LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

ShelL*.~LZ5 



UNITED STATES OF AMERiCA. 



VISIONS AND SERVICE 



FOURTEEN DISCOURSES DELIVERED 
IN COLLEGE CHAPELS 



WILLIAM LAWRENCE 

BISHOP OF MASSACHUSETTS 









K9> 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1896 



lOlifb 



1 



VI 






Copyright, 1896, 
By WILLIAM LAWRENCE. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



TO 

MY WIFE 

I INSCRIBE THIS VOLUME 



NOTE 

A residence of ten years in Cambridge 
under the shadow of its great University 
binds one to the students with strong ties of 
affection. A man camiot come into contact with 
them daily without gaining confidence in their 
high purpose, respect for their character, sym- 
pathy in their doubts and temptations, and a 
reverence for their love of truth, their chivalry 
and their simple faith. Many of the intel- 
lectual and religious problems which they en- 
counter can befoicght out o?ily by hard thinking 
and deep discussion. But when they come to 
Church I believe they want to hear from one 
who, sympathizing with their difficulties, speaks 
the most simple, sincere, and strong words of 
the Christia?i faith. 

In the earnest hope of helping to a firmer 
faith and a higher life some young men in 
Cambridge, as well as other members of a be- 
loved congregation, the words in this volume 
were spoken. Perhaps they may help a few 
at a distance. 



NOTE 

These sermons were preached by me while 
Dean of the Episcopal Theological School and 
also Preacher to Harvard University, in St. 
John's Memorial Chapel, in the Chapel of the 
University, and in other Collegiate Chapels. 

WILLIAM LAWRENCE. 
Boston, January i, i8qb. 

vi 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. The Young Man's Vision i 

II. The Challenge of Jesus 19 

III. The Fixedness of Character .... 35 

IV. The Worth of One Fact 53 

V. A Skilful Defence 68 

VI. The Unchangeableness and the 

Changeableness of Faith .... 85 

VII. The Priests' Taunt 104 

VIII. Three Characters 122 

IX. The University Man in Active Life . 138 

X. Jesus in His Own City 156 

XL Heavenly-Mindedness 173 

XII. Privilege and Helpfulness 189 

XIII. A Key-Note of College Life .... 202 

XIV. A Servant of His Own Generation . 218 



VISIONS AND SERVICE 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 1 

There was war between Syria and 
Israel. The king of Syria had attempted 
to surprise the camp of the Israelites 
several times, but on each occasion the 
army of Israel had been forewarned and 
had escaped. 

The Syrian king suspected those in 
his own camp of treachery. Upon call- 
ing his men about him, however, and 
asking for the traitor, he was told that 
the spy was not among his followers. 
" But," said they, " Elisha, the prophet 
that is in Israel, telleth the King of 
Israel the words that thou speakest in 
thy bed-chamber." 

Such a magician must be seized. 

"Go and spy where he is," was the 

1 St. John's Memorial Chapel, Cambridge, Sep- 
tember 29, 1889. 

x 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

command of the Syrian king. Elisha 
was at Dothan, with a young man, his 
servant. The expedition for the capture 
sets out in the night — " horses and 
chariots and a great host" — and sur- 
rounds Dothan. In the early morning 
the servant of Elisha, as he is going out 
of the house, catches sight of the army 
about the city, and hurries back with the 
cry, "Alas, my master, how shall we 
do ? " But the prophet, though unarmed 
and with only one panic-stricken servant 
to protect him, is not moved by the host 
of the enemy. " Fear not," he says, 
" for they that be with us are more than 
they that be with them." 

The young man cannot catch his mean- 
ing; he sees no friendly army, no horses 
or chariots marching to their relief, no- 
thing but the hostile forces. And yet the 
prophet seems to have some power some- 
where to support him. " And Elisha 
prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee open 
his eyes that he may see. And the Lord 
opened the eyes of the young man ; and 
he saw ; and behold the mountain was 
full of horses and chariots of fire round 
about Elisha." 1 

1 2 Kings vi. 17. 
2 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

There was a power there. To the eye 
of faith the heavenly host was visible, 
standing behind and around, and giving 
its support. 

I have chosen this incident for our 
study, this morning, because it seems 
to suggest some thoughts in connection 
with this our first Sunday of the open- 
ing term of school and college ; a Sun- 
day which has a significance to all of 
us, for it strikes the note of another 
year of routine and duty in home, busi- 
ness, and society. 

And by coincidence there is a special 
meaning in this incident to-day, for this 
Sunday happens to fall upon the Feast 
of St. Michael and all Angels ; a day 
when the church lifts up her eyes to 
the realization of the heavenly host, 
their number, their power, their order, 
and their glory. Michaelmas is the title 
that appropriately marks the opening 
term of the universities of England. 

Here, in the scene, we have a young 
man panic-stricken at the power of the 
enemy, led by the prayer of the older 
man to an upward look, and to open his 
eyes to the heavenly forces that were 
standing ready to protect and fight for 
3 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

the servant of God. In this, we catch 
the first thought, that the forces, limit- 
less in number and power, were there, 
waiting only for one of spiritual vision 
to reveal them. Perhaps at first sight 
this seems unreal, mystical, and unprac- 
tical. And yet is it not similar to many 
phases of life ? 

It is a commonplace, for instance, that 
the enormous increase in men's use of 
the forces in nature is not due to man's 
creation, but to his discovery of what 
was already in nature. The electric 
forces which are now at work in our 
streets and homes, and which are caus- 
ing such readjustment of our habits of 
life, are not new creations. The latent 
powers were there, waiting only for the 
patient labor, the skill and the scientific 
spirit of man to reveal them and har- 
ness them into man's service. Or, again, 
as the flood of young and eager life 
poured into this city last week, they 
knew that in the library and lectures and 
historic heritages here are storehouses 
of knowledge and wisdom. It is for this 
they have come. But if they thought at 
all, they must have realized that these 
riches revealed themselves only to those 
4 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

who were ready to open their eyes to 
them, and by patient study bring them 
into their lives. 

Now the question arises whether there 
is not something analogous to this in the 
realm of character and of spiritual things. 
Are we to agree that there are limitless 
resources in nature and in knowledge, 
and deny that character and spiritual 
manhood have any such storehouse ? 
Or, are we to accept the fact that the 
heavenly powers are, and that they stand 
ready to serve any man who will discover 
them and call them to his aid ? 

Here, it seems to me, is to be found 
the dividing line between those who are 
going to use and those who are going to 
misuse the coming year, — whether in 
college, business, or the home, — in the 
question whether they are going to trust 
only to what they have, their present 
strength, character, social position, and 
money, or whether they are going to live 
with the realization that there are infi- 
nite powers of character and spirit be- 
hind and above them ; whether they are 
going to look only at the enemy, the 
temptations and trials of life, or whether, 
with the power of those realized, they 
5 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

are going to seek heavenly strength to 
defeat them. 

It is here, I think, that the talk of 
college temptations, of which we hear 
and read so much, reveals a weak spot 
in the Christian armor of to-day. There 
is in it something of the panic-stricken 
servant, " Alas, my master, how shall we 
do ? " There are college temptations, 
we know too well. There may be a very 
few dastardly spirits who delight in lead- 
ing others into temptation. There are 
weak youths ; and — must we say it ? — 
there are weak parents. There are dan- 
gers enough in all phases of life. But 
what the Christian thought needs to-day 
is, with the realization of the force of the 
enemy, a far stronger faith in the force 
of character ; the upward look, the con- 
viction that if a man will only set him- 
self to see into and call down those 
heavenly powers to his aid, he has a rein- 
forcement which is able to overcome any 
temptation. 

What are these forces ? Let me name 
a few : they are familiar to our ears, but 
not familiar enough in our personal ex- 
perience. There is, as the fundamental 
6 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

power, the truth that God is ; that the 
Almighty, the Jehovah, the Heavenly 
Father, now lives and works and loves. 
Perhaps we do not think of it often in 
this way. Yet, after all, it is the assur- 
ance of God's existence that is our deep- 
est and final support. Cut it out from 
your life, and what have you but chaos ? 
Bring it into your life, not as a common- 
place, but as a vital truth, and you have 
this, that as God is Truth, and Love, 
and Wisdom, you have, if you abide in 
God's presence, the whole power of 
Truth, Love, and Wisdom to back you. 
You have an infinite storehouse from 
which to draw. From Him cometh, and 
may come, in these months, if we seek 
them, every good and perfect gift. 

Again, there is the fact that the Son 
of God once walked this earth, and that 
He lived a spotless life ; and, having 
tasted for man the sufferings and ills 
common to men, and having conquered 
sin and death, now lives, and sitting on 
the right hand of the Father, is forever 
the type of the perfect humanity, and 
the inspiration to all men to live as in 
His presence. Imagine for a moment, if 
you can, the facts and the power of the 
7 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

life of Jesus cut out, eliminated from 
history and modern civilization, and 
from the lives of men, and what have 
you of character and moral fibre and all 
that goes to make up the best of hu- 
manity ? The fact of the Incarnation of 
the Son of God is, however, a truth from 
which the world has only begun to draw. 
There are infinite possibilities still un- 
fathomed. 

The truth of the brooding of the Holy 
Spirit over the lives of men, and of His 
waiting to touch them with the fire of 
divine love, has hardly yet been ex- 
plored. 

Again, there is that great army of 
apostles, saints, and martyrs, who by 
noble lives and perhaps nobler deaths 
have given their testimony to the truth 
of Jesus. The Christian who meets with 
any enemy knows that he has behind 
him their sympathy and example. There 
are, too, those mysterious beings and 
powers of which this day speaks, ten 
thousand times ten thousand, angels and 
archangels, all ministering spirits. What- 
ever your theory may be about them, 
they stand for heavenly, spiritual forces 
waiting to come to the aid of men. 
8 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

It is of them that we read in great 
spiritual crises. They break the silence 
of the first Christmas night, and are the 
first to speak from the empty tomb on 
Easter morning. They minister to the 
Saviour after His victories over the 
tempter in the wilderness and in Geth- 
semane. And in the midst of His 
betrayal there stand twelve legions of 
angels ready to come at His bidding. 

These are only hints and suggestions. 
No word of man can describe the wealth 
of spiritual resource that is at the bid- 
ding of any Christian. My point is only 
to emphasize the truth that it is a dull 
and spiritless life that looks forward to a 
year of simply holding one's own against 
the temptations of life. We are alto- 
gether too ready to regret that virtue 
and religion must have a struggle in 
these days to survive at all. We then 
settle down to the average tone, feeling 
that if we are not wholly overcome by 
the enemy, we are doing well enough. 
Whereas, with such spiritual resources 
to draw from, with powers about us wait- 
ing for us to seize them and bring them 
into service, we could gather to ourselves 
such a force of character, of moral 
9 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

strength and spiritual purpose, as would 
confound the enemies that now look so 
powerful. 

It is strange how the best powers are 
unrecognized because they are unher- 
alded. To estimate the character of 
many young men as they appear on the 
surface, some might say that they were 
wholly thoughtless ; some might say that 
they were cynical and bad. Some do 
say all these. I believe it to be true, 
however, that there are very few who 
do not have beneath that superficial 
manner, certainly in their more serious 
moments, when they are most them- 
selves, a real desire to do better and to be 
stronger and purer and more useful than 
they are. They would like to draw some 
of the heavenly forces to their aid ; they 
do not realize that their classmates and 
friends are desiring the same ; so they 
drop down to the average. But if the 
hearts of all those who want more of 
the heavenly vision and power should 
be revealed, we should stand amazed at 
their number. 

Thus far I have been trying to em- 
phasize the fact of the heavenly powers, 
and of a desire in many for them. The 
10 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

question now comes before us, How is 
the vision to be gained, and how are the 
powers to be brought into service ? 

The answer is in the text : "And Eli- 
sha prayed and said, Lord, I pray thee 
open his eyes." 

Prayer ; and yet I do not understand 
by this, merely formal verbal prayer. In 
it is first the upward look, the heavenly 
determination in life and hope. The 
resources of nature reveal themselves 
only to him who has an eye for them and 
a patient determination to seek them. 
The secrets of knowledge are an open 
vision only to the student. The powers 
of heaven wait for the bidding of him 
who has the look and the aim toward 
heavenly things. Let a man realize ever 
so vividly the danger of the temptations 
about him, and if he have no desire for 
strength of character, he is helpless. 
Let a man long for purity and the attain- 
ment of high ideals, and if his life and 
talk are of the earth, earthy, the ideals 
are impossible. Let a man envy the 
faith of others, their usefulness and their 
highmindedness, and if he do not look 
upward to Him from whom come all 
these gifts, he will die envying another 
ii 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

for graces which he has made no effort 
to gain. 

Here is the crucial point. We want 
the heavenly forces to back us. Have 
we the determination to drag them down 
to our aid ? Have we the patience to so 
frame our thoughts and lives that we 
can call them ? In other words, if you 
want to grow in character this year, if 
you want to keep pure and true, if you 
want to have the strength to meet temp- 
tation, you must do as in everything 
else, keep on the alert for it ; form habits 
which will help you towards it. 

Young men, and older men too, drop 
prayer and worship and all regular reli- 
gious habits for years, and are then sur- 
prised some day to wake up to the fact 
that they have lost their faith. Then 
they lay the blame on the Church, on an 
uninteresting preacher, or on their cir- 
cumstances, on anything but themselves. 
Of course they have lost their faith ; 
faith would not be worth the having if it 
could be kept with such neglect. No ! 
as you value your faith, your God and 
your Saviour, as you look for a nobler and 
better character, keep the spiritual eye 
upward. Pray when and where you will, 

12 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

but pray as a habit. The heavenly eye 
must be kept trained and adjusted to 
heavenly visions if it would gain any- 
thing from them. Habit, patient deter- 
mined habit, is the basis of the best 
characters and of the largest revelations ; 
habit that is never allowed to master the 
spirit, but that serves the spirit in lead- 
ing up to higher and higher standpoints. 
Hold on to your habit of worship. Sun- 
day after Sunday, join with others in 
prayer and praise ; and so stimulate the 
spiritual vigor which may have abated in 
the week. 

Thus far I have been speaking of our- 
selves and of our own spiritual enforce- 
ment. But the question arises as to 
what place this truth has in our relation 
to other people ; in trying, for instance, 
to do our duty by our friends or our 
children. 

When you see your old schoolmate, or 
your present classmate or fellow clerk 
or companion, gradually drifting away 
from religious habits, and then from re- 
ligious life ; when you watch him weak- 
ening in his convictions of right and 
wrong, of purity and honor; and you 

J 3 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

know that the powers of the world, the 
love of popularity, of a good time, or of 
money are looming up in front of him ; 
when you long to stand behind him 
and warn him and brace him up and 
bring him back to faith and purity, how 
are you going to do it ? Will you 
simply tell him that he ought to turn 
over a new leaf and do better ? Will 
you urge him to go to church with you ? 
Will you ask him to give his soul to 
Jesus ? 

You may do one or all of these. But 
I tell you that before these touch or help 
him he is going to look you in the eye. 
He is going to look you through and 
through, and if he discovers any falter- 
ing of faith on your part, if he learns that 
some of the same weaknesses attach 
to you that you have found in him ; 
if he sees not in your life the strength 
of character, the simplicity, the calm 
assurance which comes from real ex- 
perience, your words are worse than use- 
less. But if your life and character tell 
of heavenly powers gained, of truth and 
honor behind and around you, of sincer- 
ity and humility, then who knows what 
heavenly visions he may have, what 
14 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

warnings of conscience, what shame, 
what repentance, what hope ? 

Or again, when the young man of 
earnest thought and love of truth comes 
to you panic-stricken at the waning or 
loss of his old child-faith, when some read- 
ing or study has startled him for the first 
time to really doubt and deny his old 
creed, even all Christian truth, as he turns 
to you with the feeling that as you are 
a Christian in profession he may claim 
you as his guide, with the cry, " Alas, 
my master, how shall we do ? " what have 
you for an answer ? Merely the cold 
statement that these are days when 
faiths are easily lost ; that you have not 
much yourself ; that he will have to get 
along without it ? Will you tell him 
that skepticism is in the air, is infec- 
tious ; that he will get over it after a 
while ? Or have prayer and heavenly 
aspirations so enriched your life that 
the young man catches in your charac- 
ter glimpses of the heavenly powers, 
and sees the possibilities of his own 
life ; forgets his loss of faith through 
despair, and calls to his service those 
forces which only Heaven can send 
him ? 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

I have been speaking mostly to the 
younger people, but I cannot shut my 
eyes to the fact that there are others 
than young people in this congregation. 

I turn to you parents, who are or who 
ought to be the interpreters of the hea- 
venly life to your children. When your 
boy comes to you with his first direct 
question, when he searches your faith to 
its foundation with that honest inquiry 
as to the meaning of your prayers, your 
creed, and your worship, are you going 
to throw him off by telling him to ask 
his Sunday-school teacher or his min- 
ister, or not to bother about such things ? 
He will bother about them. He will 
ask. And those questions must be an- 
swered by men and books of unbelief if 
he gets no response from a man of be- 
lief. Then is your opportunity ; are you 
able to seize it ? Is your faith in the 
heavenly life real and strong and deep 
enough to lift him out of his questions 
into assurance ? Is the response of your 
life consistent with the answer of your 
lips ? While you talk of heavenly things, 
do you live the heavenly life? While 
you urge him to the upward look, to 
the realization of the powers of right- 
16 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

eousness and truth, are your eyes too 
uplifted? And are these same powers 
backing your life in business, society, and 
politics ? I tell you that the boy's ques- 
tion strikes deep, and only a life can 
reveal the answer. So, my friends, we 
are all interpreters, revealers of the hea- 
venly powers to men ; all Elishas unfold- 
ing visions of spiritual ambitions and 
armies of spiritual powers. This is the 
glory of the ministry, that its whole work 
is the revealing to men by word and life 
the truths and the forces of the heavenly 
life. It is the prophet's or the preacher's 
mission. Aye, it is the mission of every 
man, minister, teacher, parent ; the point- 
ing upward, the revealing of the limit- 
less resources of the spiritual world, the 
bringing of those forces to the develop- 
ment of character, and the increase of 
strength to overcome the enemy. 

As our closing thought let us follow 
to its end the story. " And behold, the 
mountain was full of horses and chariots 
of fire round about Elisha. And when 
they came down to him," " the Lord 
smote the Syrians with blindness," and 
Elisha led them captive to Samaria and 
delivered them to the king of Israel. 



THE YOUNG MAN'S VISION 

Given a man of faith and the heavenly 
powers behind him, and you have untold 
possibilities. History is full of such in- 
stances ; men and women, single-handed, 
but with the heavenly vision, effecting 
what armies could hardly accomplish. 
Trusting in the heavenly powers, Lu- 
ther roused the heart of Europe against 
the tyranny of the Pope. By faith Lati- 
mer, when led to the stake, cheered his 
companions with the assurance that they 
should light such a candle in England as 
would never be put out. In obedience 
to his heavenly insight, Livingstone 
entered the heart of Africa and led the 
Christian world to realize the degrada- 
tion and slavery of the dark continent. 
By the open vision of the young man, 
Gordon led the hosts in China and be- 
came a martyr in Soudan. By faith 
Patteson and Hannington and Father 
Damien have given to this century the 
types of Christian heroism. 

Keep, therefore, your eye upon the 
heavenly powers ; call them to your ser- 
vice, and with them around you take up 
the routine and the duties of life. 
18 



II 

THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 1 

John the Baptist's work was done. 
The popular enthusiasm for him had 
passed ; forsaken by the crowd, almost 
friendless, imprisoned, nothing remained 
for him in this life but the death sen- 
tence of Herod and the axe of the ex- 
ecutioner. The last message had just 
passed from the Baptist to Jesus, and 
His answer was on its way to the dun- 
geon. As the people followed with their 
eye the retiring figures of the messen- 
gers of the imprisoned John, the mem- 
ory of the scene of his preaching and 
popularity must have swept over them ; 
and the contrast of his position then and 
now must have moved them, some to 
pity, but the most of them to a disdain 
of a man who had mounted, and for the 
moment had rested on the crest of a 
wave of popular enthusiasm, but who 

1 Appleton Chapel, Harvard University, February 
2, 1890. 

l 9 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

had sunk, and was now imprisoned and 
degraded. 

Anticipating these thoughts, the Sa- 
viour hastened to convince the people 
that the failure was with them, and not 
with the Baptist ; that in their mistaken 
view of his mission they had failed to 
grasp the greatness of his character ; that 
in going out to see a man who was the 
object of popular applause, they had 
neglected to see in him the elements 
which, when the crisis came, threw pop- 
ular applause to the winds. 

" And when the messengers of John 
were departed, He began to speak unto 
the people concerning John, What went 
ye out into the wilderness for to see ? 
A reed shaken with the wind? But 
what went ye out for to see ? A man 
clothed in soft raiment ? Behold, they 
which are gorgeously apparelled and 
live delicately, are in kings' courts. But 
what went ye out for to see ? A pro- 
phet ? Yea, I say unto you, and much 
more than a prophet." 1 

Three types of character, — all of 
them existing in the Baptist's day, all 
of them existing in our day, — three 

1 Luke vii. 24-26. 
20 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

types, each of which appeals to every 
one of us, and claims our interest, and 
may claim our lives. 

"A reed shaken with the wind." 
With those words, our memories, like the 
memories of those who had stood on Jor- 
dan's banks, run back to a summer's day, 
when, as we have walked through some 
meadow, or floated down some placid 
stream, we have watched the stately 
sedges and reeds sway and bend beneath 
the moving air ; they seem to anticipate 
the coming breeze before we feel it, and 
prepare to bend their heads to avoid the 
sharp or sudden blast ; graceful, yield- 
ing, they right themselves, and swing 
again to the changing air. 

The perfect type of the pliable char- 
acter. We have not time to describe it 
as it was in the Baptist's day. There 
are so many phases that interest us now 
all about us. It is one of the admira- 
ble features of culture that it adds to the 
grace of living. The highly cultivated 
man may have the same strong convic- 
tions as the ignorant man, but he ex- 
presses them in a gentler and more 
sympathetic way, and so avoids the fric- 
tion of hard and angular characters. 

21 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

In these days, when popular opinion 
gathers force so quickly, and moves in 
such varied currents, and when the con- 
victions and sentiments are so intricate 
and so differently expressed, it is well, it is 
necessary, that tact and grace and a wide 
sympathy with other views should come 
to the aid of strong opinion and help it 
yield and bend in certain ways, though 
standing firm by its deeper convictions. 
But — and here is the point of the Sa- 
viour's word — the danger comes when 
yielding and pliability become the char- 
acteristic of the man, and strength of 
character is sapped in the effort to meet 
every wave of popular opinion, and to 
let it pass over without resistance. 

One might almost say that this is the 
danger of the nineteenth century, and 
the temptation which above all besets 
every boy and young man who has an 
ambition in life. The rise of democracy 
has put the power into the hands of the 
people and of public opinion. He who 
would succeed must be in touch with 
the people, and sensitive to every move- 
ment of public opinion. We know that 
the manufacturer who expects to sell 
his goods next year must already know, 

22 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

or learn, or rather feel, what the people 
are going to want next year ; and the 
politician who is going to get office must 
have already anticipated the popular 
opinion on certain questions ; and so 
with the smallest spheres of life. The 
result is that, like some animals that can 
feel the coming storm before they see it, 
we are developing an extreme sensitive- 
ness to popular movements and popular 
opinion which may work to our safety, 
and which often works to our destruc- 
tion. This temptation to yield quietly 
and gracefully to the breezes of popular 
opinion — there is not one of us that 
does not feel it. 

We have seen a young man enter poli- 
tics, and in the first years of his political 
life stand as stiff and true under the 
varying movements as the little reed 
that is just springing from the meadow. 
But as he rises into popular view and 
feels more directly the waves of the 
different parties and opinions, how he 
droops and sways ! And who can tell 
which way he will next swing? In his 
political rise he has reached a position 
where the waves of party affiliation and 
policy have a much heavier weight than 
23 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

any of us realize. His opinions are no 
weaker, but the pressure is so much 
heavier that his convictions have to 
yield. 

We have seen girls enter society, and 
young men enter college life, and pass 
through the same experience. At first 
the ideas of the true life, though small 
and narrow in some features, are clear 
and strong. Home and school life and 
parents' words have set the lines of right 
and wrong. With the larger life of 
society and college, however, principles 
carried into action become more intricate 
and definite, convictions more difficult. 
Those whom we admire do what we 
consider questionable, and those whom 
others admire do what we believe is low 
and degrading or wrong. Then comes 
the shrinking from being considered 
peculiar, from setting ourselves up as 
stronger or better than the rest. What 
right has one ugly reed to stand stiff 
and upright, when all the others bend 
gracefully to the breeze ? And so we 
bend ; we will not break, we say. Thus 
we do the " correct thing ; " we create 
no ill-feeling, we appear modest and 
never self-assertive; we move in syn> 
24 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

pathy with our comrades ; we strengthen 
no one, and help no one to keep his 
convictions, and gradually our principles 
weaken. Unless, my friends, we guard 
ourselves and keep true to our better 
selves, and sometimes dare to stand 
strong, we become the world's puppet ; 
admired, and at the same time despised ; 
to the popular view, respectable ; to the 
view of all true men, and of your inner 
self, simply despicable. 

You know, and I know, men and 
women to-day, whom we meet in society 
and see in the clubs and on the streets, 
who are not bad or grossly immoral ; 
they are no worse than the public opin- 
ion about them makes them, and no 
better. They simply exist, and grace- 
fully bend as they are moved. 

Is it of one of us that Jesus speaks ? 
A reed shaken with the wind ? 

" But what went ye out for to see ? A 
man clothed in soft raiment ? " 

It cannot be that this type exists in 
modern life, we say. In those ancient 
days when monarchs lived in royal state 
and the people were ignorant, character 
and position might have been measured 
25 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

by the wealth of garments and houses 
and the size of retinues. And in Europe, 
we may still find the same. A social 
caste, an aristocracy, create social ambi- 
tions and all the sycophant's spirit which 
goes with them. But in the democracy, 
each man is measured by his worth, not 
in houses and carriages and clothes, but 
as a man of character. The people in 
St. Petersburg, Berlin, and even in Lon- 
don, may crowd out to see those who 
are sumptuously apparelled and live in 
kings' houses ; but we — we Americans 
— flock and crowd about the man ; 
we select the noblest character in the 
community for our applause ; our news- 
papers are full of the wise sayings and 
ennobling words of the purest and most 
intelligent and truest men in the land ; 
we hear not of the people whose only 
title to popular esteem is their income 
and their houses and their dances. 

Is it in sober truth, or in sarcasm, that 
this is spoken ? Let each man answer 
for himself. 

If one can figure popular interest by 

the circulation of these newspapers which 

treat of men and women clothed in soft 

raiment, of those which are filled with 

26 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

petty personalities and society gossip, 
and talk about the silliest and weakest 
and most despicable creatures in society, 
I am afraid that our assertions of popu- 
lar interest in the noble character must 
be taken as sarcasm. The gossip of 
kings' courts had some touch of char- 
acter, for it dealt with historic interests 
and real powers, though it dealt with 
them in a mean way. And the thought 
of an aristocracy has in it associations 
with a noble past at least, though the 
present be ignoble : but the reading by 
the half hour and hour together of the 
petty personalities of those whose only 
distinction is that they have suddenly 
become rich, the devouring of books that 
treat of the silliest and not the strongest 
and noblest characters in society makes 
us ashamed of ourselves. 

Oh ! ye upholders of democracy, where 
man is man, and manhood is respected for 
its own sake, what go ye out for to see ? 
Do our newspapers, our small talk, and 
much of our popular literature belie us ? 
Have we no nobler object of interest 
than richly clothed men and women, and 
no nobler ideal than to become as one 
of them ? In our weaker moments some 
27 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

of us envy them, but at heart we despise 
them, and despise ourselves for regard- 
ing them. 

But what went ye out for to see ? 
A prophet ? 

A prophet. We have a crude notion 
of what that is — a man of severe mien, 
strong but hard, denunciatory, unsympa- 
thetic ; or one who, magician-like, fore- 
tells events in the far future. 

But surely there is something greater 
and more vital in the true prophet than 
foretelling events and denouncing sins. 
The prophet is the speaker for God ; he 
interprets to men the heart and thought 
of God. Two features, therefore, belong 
to him, which are not confined to the 
days of Elijah or of John the Baptist, 
or to the pulpit and the ordained 
preachers of these days, but features 
which may be in the possession of any 
one, thus making him, up to the limit of 
his powers, a Prophet ; and these, are 
the knowledge of God and the knowledge 
of men. 

A young man breaks from a maze of 
doubts about God and religion into the 
conviction that whatever else may be 
28 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

true, righteousness is eternally right ; 
and he lives by that. Soon he finds that 
living by that law he is led into the 
realm of truth, of purity, of love, of sac- 
rifice, and of grateful service. Behind 
all these he craves the fact of a person- 
ality. And then by that same path, over 
which millions have trod, he is led to the 
faith in the personal God, the Heavenly 
Father. From lame and halting aspira- 
tions he is drawn to more direct and dis- 
tinct prayer. Then, in that communion 
which is more than prayer, he receives 
from God his noblest hopes, his highest 
ambitions, and his deepest truths. As 
God whom he adores and with whom he 
communes is perfectly pure, true, and 
just, the man becomes sensitive to im- 
purity, untruth, and injustice. As he 
speaks or acts, so far as he is in com- 
munion with God, he speaks or acts for 
God. The man who thus knows God 
does not necessarily ascend the pulpit 
steps, nor stand like Elijah, or the Bap- 
tist, before kings, but in the smaller circle 
of his friends he speaks, and in the wider 
circles of his acquaintances he acts. His 
voice may find an echo in hearts at a 
distance. In book and song and story 
29 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

he may speak. But in all these, when 
his voice sounds for the right and true, 
he speaks for God ; he is God's pro- 
phet. Coleridge, Maurice, Keble, and 
Kingsley were prophets by their firesides 
as well as through their books. Carlyle 
also in his early days, Ruskin and Bright ; 
aye, and many men whose voices have 
never reached beyond their fireside or 
the limits of their humble village, men 
of God, peasants and miners and factory 
hands, were prophets. For, by a close 
and intimate communion, tested by years 
of spiritual experience, they have known 
God ; and when they have his word to 
speak, they have uttered it with no un- 
certain sound. 

The prophet must have a knowledge 
of men. For how can he speak to their 
sins, their wants, or their ambitions, un- 
less he know well what they are ? He 
cannot stand apart ; but living, working, 
enjoying, suffering with men, he will 
probe to their innermost thoughts, and 
with that instinct which comes with in- 
timate knowledge, he will leap at their 
most secret ambitions. As sensitive as 
the tenderest reed to the coming breeze, 
he will feel the coming social and reli- 
30 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

gious movements and will utter his sharp 
note of warning or of hope. Study the 
lives of those whom I have mentioned, 
and you will see how we are living in 
the sins and the blessings which those 
men anticipated a generation ago. 

I say that they are as sensitive as the 
reed ; but — mark the difference — un- 
like the reed, when it is a question of 
right or wrong, they refuse to bend to 
the popular breeze, but assert the right 
of the man to stand. Aye ! so convinced 
are they of God's truth that it is hardly 
an effort to stand : for the principles of 
God are so inwrought into their charac- 
ters that they can do nothing but stand. 
Their knowledge of men gives them the 
tact, the insight, and the readiness to 
bend when yielding is right ; their know- 
ledge of God keeps them true and strong 
when yielding is weak and not right. 

Have we been wandering from our 
thought ? 

What go ye out into life to see ? Surely 
not a reed shaken with the wind. Far less 
the man clothed in soft raiment. The 
prophet ; he who, full of the divine life, 
is true and strong ; and he who, intensely 
3 1 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

interested in men, is full of sympathy, 
grace, and tact. Prophets have not al- 
ways been these ; sometimes they have 
been hard, and under harsh treatment 
have become embittered, and then they 
cease to speak for God ; but these are 
the qualities of the true prophet. 

Now, if you will, go out into the world 
and look for such men. You may find 
one in the heyday of popularity and an- 
other in lonely neglect, or perhaps some 
young prophet who is soon to catch the 
ears of the people, but who looks not 
to their applause for his reward. Wher- 
ever you discover them, you will see 
those whom the world to-day needs 
above all others, men of courage — cour- 
age to speak their convictions and to 
stand by them ; courage to meet defeat 
of their dearest hopes in patience ; and, 
what is sometimes harder, courage to 
meet success without yielding a hair's 
breadth in principle. You will find men 
who esteem public opinion, but who will 
never become its slave ; who are ready, 
so far as they can consistently, to do 
what is called the correct thing, but who 
will always do the right thing ; men 
who will risk popularity to denounce a 
32 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

sin, and who will be socially ostracized, 
if that is necessary, to uphold a virtue. 

They will be men of hope. No cynic 
or pessimist was eyer a true prophet. 
Such men live in the ills of the present. 
But however evil the present may be, the 
prophet always has God above and be- 
hind him, and the conviction that some- 
how, some day, God's light will break 
forth before him. The prophets of old 
to a man pointed forward to the brighter 
day, to the coming of the Sun of Right- 
eousness. 

In all the turmoil of disappointed 
hopes and unfulfilled ambitions of these 
days, in the discontent and cynicism of 
rich and poor alike, in the sins and sor- 
rows and sufferings of our pushing civil- 
ization, the voice that needs to be heard 
above all others is that of the prophet of 
hope and peace and relief. 

Given the man of God, the man 
among men, the man of courage and of 
hope, and you have the leader of all true 
men. 

What go ye out for to see ? A reed 
shaken with the wind ? a man clothed in 
soft raiment ? A prophet ? 

Oh, you who are young, whose lives 
33 



THE CHALLENGE OF JESUS 

will be moulded by your leaders ; who 
are now looking here and there to see 
what career you will mark out for your- 
self ; you who are studying and talking 
of the leaders of to-day in society, in the 
professions, in public life, and in litera- 
ture, listen to the challenge of Jesus : 
Whom go ye out for to see? Which 
crowd will you join ? Which leader will 
you take ? 

34 



Ill 

THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 1 

Science is teaching us what the pro- 
phets tried to teach the people of their 
day, that a man's life cannot be cut up 
into separate parts which have no rela- 
tion to each other. Life is a living 
stream, and whatever pours into it be- 
comes a part of its current, either for 
good or for bad. We must go even 
farther than this, and recognize the fact 
that all human life, through its various 
generations, is bound together, so that 
each one of us is more or less the result 
of the past. On this fact was founded 
the old doctrine of original sin, and on 
this is based the principle of heredity. 

The people to whom the prophet Eze- 
kiel preached recognized all this ; but 
instead of using it as a motive for devel- 
oping the good in themselves, they made 
it an excuse for their wrong-doing. " Our 

1 St. John's Memorial Chapel, Cambridge, March 
5> 1893. 

35 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

fathers, and not ourselves, are to blame 
for our sins," was their cry. " Our fa- 
thers have eaten sour grapes, and their 
children's teeth are set on edge ; the 
fathers have sinned, and the children 
are not responsible for their sin." How 
familiar it all sounds ! It is the same ex- 
cuse that we are hearing every day, — a 
half truth, which becomes a lie when ex- 
aggerated into the whole truth. There- 
fore the prophet emphasized the other 
side of the truth, the personal responsi- 
bility of each man for his own sins or 
righteousness. 

"The soul that sinneth, it shall die. 
The son shall not bear the iniquity of 
the father, neither shall the father bear 
the iniquity of the son. The righteous- 
ness of the righteous shall be upon him, 
and the wickedness of the wicked shall 
be upon him." 1 

Each one of us, from birth to the grave, 
is by thought, word, and action building 
up his life, for bad or for good. Each 
one of us is giving a set to his charac- 
ter every moment that he lives, either 
for evil or for righteousness. The 
thought, then, that I want to bring out 

1 Ezekiel xviii. 20. 

36 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

is that of the fixedness of character for 
bad and for good. 

Such a truth comes to us rather natu- 
rally in these days, when the inexorable 
laws of nature are so clearly brought be- 
fore us in our scientific mode of thought. 
The laws of our body are just as inexorable 
as are the other laws of nature as seen in 
geology or in botany. Any abuse of the 
body, any sin against the laws of health, 
is going to wreak its vengeance upon the 
body just as surely as a burn is to make 
a scar. Whether that sin was com- 
mitted long ago or yesterday, whether 
it is unknown to others or not, whether 
the effects conceal themselves for years 
or not, the fact stands that the scar is 
there. Nature has been violated, and 
nature will reassert itself. I do not 
know that the scientific habit of mind 
has any greater lesson to teach us, espe- 
cially those who are young, than that 
fact. We know how easily it is thrown 
aside. The young are strong and vig- 
orous, and their physiques will endure 
many violations of the laws of self-re- 
straint and temperance without showing 
the result. Thus they are led to think 
that the results are not there. What 
37 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

they want to weigh in their minds is 
this, that whether the results show them- 
selves or not, they are bound to be. It 
is in the neglect of this law that people 
are liable to condone the sins of those 
who are young, and to say that they are 
not as bad as those of more mature years. 
We thus fall into the philosophy that it 
is the natural thing for the enthusiasms 
and the high spirits of youth to work 
themselves off in some form of license 
or debauchery which would not be en- 
dured in older men. So we drop into 
the habit of expecting that wild oats will 
be sown, and that there is no help for it. 
In all honesty it must be said, I think, 
that when the young are in exceptional 
conditions, perhaps away from home and 
without the restraints of family life, they 
are more liable to fall into temptation, 
and to do things which they never would 
have thought of doing at home. Such 
sins may not have the permanent con- 
tinuance of those committed in other 
times of life, because of the temporary 
conditions. When those conditions have 
passed, and those special temptations are 
left behind, the young man will not have 
the same pressure to continue in the evil 

38 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

habit. And yet, with this said, the fact 
stands that the sin is a sin ; the viola- 
tion of nature's laws is a sin ; and even 
if the habit is not continued, for those 
sins nature will wreak vengeance in 
some form or other. The young man 
knows that he has sinned against him- 
self, against his whole education, against 
his parents' words and his own honor. 
He is ashamed to think of his life for 
the past three months in connection 
with his home. He tries to set it apart 
and excuse himself by saying that this 
is college life, or this is city life, or 
this is life in Europe, and that it is 
a temporary matter ; and that that is 
home life. 

But whether this is temporary or not, 
the man is the same. He cannot divide 
himself ; he goes from here to there, 
and the laws of the spiritual and of the 
physical life follow him wherever he 
goes ; what he does here has its result 
there. The sin is the same whether un- 
der temporary conditions or not, and the 
results of sin are the same, as far as they 
affect others. When a man has to-day 
by his word or example dragged down 
one of his fellows a step lower in his 
39 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

ideal ; when he has led another to vio- 
late his conscience ; when the action of a 
man who has been brought up with pure 
surroundings is bad, and thereby leads 
another to degradation : he may go to his 
home and be as pure as he pleases ; he 
may attend his parish church and receive 
the communion ; he may be counted 
most respectable and try to be most re- 
spectable ; but all the time those whom 
he has left behind, those whom he has 
touched with the poison of his life, are 
going into further degradation, and he 
alone is responsible. The more respect- 
able he becomes, if he is not ashamed of 
his sin, and if he makes no effort to undo 
the wrong that he has done, the more 
of a hypocrite he becomes. In fact, I 
know of no hypocrisy equal to that of a 
man who has sown his wild oats, as it is 
called, who has led others into degrada- 
tion, and then, tired of that sort of life, 
settles down as a respectable citizen and 
a good Churchman, without repentance, 
without shame, and without the effort to 
do something to recompense for his 
wickedness ; who sets himself up as a 
model of social virtue, and speaks with 
pity or scorn of the degraded men and 
40 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

women of the city of the same class that 
he led to degradation. 

Whether, then, the sin be temporary, 
and under exceptional surroundings, the 
sin is the same in its essence, in its re- 
sults upon others; and — this is the next 
point — it is the same in its results upon 
the man himself. 

You know that there are certain chem- 
ical properties which in certain combi- 
nations make heat, and in others make 
light, and in others make power. So, 
sin does not assert itself in its results in 
the same form, but it reveals itself in 
the most unexpected ways. An old man, 
for instance, may be querulous, selfish, 
and autocratic, and yet he seems to be 
in his way a religious man. Trace back 
his life forty or fifty years ; and in the 
yielding to the sins of youth, in intem- 
perance and other excesses, you will 
find the seeds of this irritability of old 
age. One would have said that nature 
would have wreaked her vengeance be- 
fore and in other forms, but nature is 
most interesting in the unexpectedness 
with which she acts. 

There is many a man on the border 
line of chronic sin, of a bondage to some 
4i 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

evil habit, who will not fall into the form 
of the bondage which others expect ; he 
will not end in the gutter ; but he is en- ■ 
tering into some form of bondage which 
will be just as strong as the more open 
bondage of the drunkard. You know 
young men who come to Cambridge with 
high ideals, pure life, and a sensitiveness 
to the touch of sin, who in the course of 
six months or a year are different. At 
first, they have thoughtlessly yielded ; 
then they have gone deeper. Now it is 
useless to say that they are going to the 
bad, that they will surely fall into bond- 
age to the lower vices ; some of them 
will, many of them will not. They will 
recover themselves, and in two or three 
years, tired of their foolish ways, will 
settle down. What harm, then, has 
come from it ? Why should n't one pass 
through this temporary phase of life, if 
the danger is not great ? This harm 
comes : that every one of them, as they 
enter into their better and more staid 
life, will be men of lower tone and of 
less vigorous character than if they had 
not sinned. Some result is just as sure 
as fate. The spiritual laws work with 
the same exactness as the physical laws. 
42 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

It is impossible for a man to sin against 
his ideal, and to hold the same ideal with 
all the firmness of the past. This is the 
heavy weight that social life and college 
life have to bear to-day, that so many 
men who pass through, and in passing 
through enter upon some phase of sin, 
are now living, on the whole, excellent 
lives, and yet who, because of their own 
past, do not uphold the high ideal of 
youth which belongs to youth. They 
dare not go back on their record and 
rebuke the sin of which they are guilty, 
lest they accuse themselves of hypo- 
crisy. So their mouths are shut, or else 
they yield to the popular idea that these 
things must be ; that a certain propor- 
tion of youth have got to go wrong for 
awhile. It is a lie ; for a certain pro- 
portion of youth do not have to go 
wrong. How many go wrong is depend- 
ent largely upon the conditions which 
surround them, upon the ideals which 
they gain from their home and school 
life. The moral tone varies in various 
years, and if the community would lift 
its standard and its expectation, there 
would be a lift in the life of all of us. 
Here, then, my friends, is the terror 
43 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

of sin, — in its fixedness. The tendency 
to sin again is the punishment of sin. 
The tendency to sin, mark you, not in 
the same form, necessarily, but in some 
form. In that incarnate son of sin, Ju- 
das, you can see how the same character 
cropped out first in the fictitious jealousy 
in behalf of the poor, that the money 
spent in the ointment should not be 
wasted, but should be given to the poor ; 
it took another form in his conversation 
with Jesus. But sin had so fixed itself 
on his character that when the crisis 
came, and our Lord pointed him out 
with the words, "That thou doest, do 
quickly," Judas rose and went to his 
work of betrayal as automatically as the 
drunkard seeks his glass. He was un- 
der the bondage of sin all the time, 
though it showed itself in varied forms, 
and was finally revealed in the treacher- 
ous kiss and the miserable suicide. 

I have been taking for the illustration 
of our truth only one class, the tempta- 
tions and sins of young men. 

But the truth holds just as firmly in 
all characters, ages, and classes. 

The keen business man who concen- 
44 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

trates his whole life upon business suc- 
cess, in his success finds that nature is 
wreaking vengeance on the physique and 
character. The nerves give way early, 
or the higher tastes and the ennobling 
thoughts of youth leave him, or he is 
haunted by the low ambition of increas- 
ing his fortune with no purpose for its 
use. He realizes the foolishness of it, 
but he cannot help enslaving himself to 
make money. 

The young woman yielding herself to 
society finds that, when the freshness 
has gone and others have taken her 
place, she has been developing a love of 
excitement which must be satisfied in 
some form ; and she takes to aimless 
traveling, or emotional religion, or de- 
moralizing novels, or anything to keep 
up the excitement of life. She has lost 
the power of repose, and of the quiet 
enjoyment of life, which is one of the 
beauties of womanhood. 

Sin, then, when it becomes fixed in 
the character, gives it a set so strong and 
hard, that in time the character moves 
like an automatic slave, and the will, the 
intellect, and the body come into per- 
fect bondage. Do not understand me as 
45 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

saying that all sin comes to this perfect 
bondage. But what I do say, even 
though I repeat it too often, is that 
every sin has its inexorable result, and 
will wreak its vengeance upon the spir- 
itual, the intellectual, and the physical 
texture of the man. 

But here arises a question which some 
of you may have been asking yourselves : 
Is this the gospel ? Do we not hear that 
Christ came to save us from sin, and 
that if we will believe Him, and trust in 
His atonement, our sins shall be wiped 
out, and we shall be washed in the blood 
of the Lamb ? Is it not possible for the 
deepest-dyed sinner to claim Jesus as his 
Saviour, and thus begin life afresh ? 

Here we must draw the distinction 
between sin in its relation to man, and 
in its relation to God. You notice that 
I have been speaking of the effect of sin 
in the character. I have not suggested 
the more important relation, that of the 
sinner to God ; I have not suggested 
that the essential evil of sin is not first 
in its results upon the character, but in 
that it is the separation of a man from 
God. It is true that the deepest-dyed 
sinner may repent and turn to God, and 
46 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

ask pardon in the name of his Son, 
Jesus Christ. It is true that God, look- 
ing into the heart of that sinner, and 
seeing in it the spirit of humility, hope, 
and of striving after purity, will look 
over the sin, will overlook it, as did the 
father when he received home the prod- 
igal. And the repentant sinner may 
dwell in perfect confidence and peace 
with the Father, as did the prodigal for 
the rest of his life in his father's home. 
No mention will be made by the Father of 
the past, no old scores called up, so long 
as there remains that spirit of submis- 
sion and dependence upon God's love. 
So life went on in the home of the prodi- 
gal after his return ; so life goes on here 
and in the next world, where repentant 
children of God trust their heavenly Fa- 
ther. 

But think you that the prodigal was 
ever guilty of the thought that he was as 
if he had never sinned ? Think you that 
he never looked back with the deepest 
sorrow at his ingratitude to the father, 
at his low indulgence, at his treachery to 
all the ideals that he had gained in his 
father's home ? More than this, must 
there not have followed him, like a night- 
47 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

mare, the faces of those whom he had 
sinned against, whom he had led to 
sin ; who had been the recipients of his 
bounty and the sharers of his feasts ? 
While he was in his father's home, they 
were going on and on, down into degra- 
dation, they were carrying his words, ay, 
they were carrying a part of his very self, 
into the lowest haunts of life ; it seemed 
as if a fraction of his heart had been torn 
from him and had gone with them. No ; 
his return home, his father's love and 
pardon, did not undo the past as far as 
he and they were concerned. There was 
nothing but to turn to the father again, 
to gain a renewed pledge of his love, to 
do what he could to redeem those of the 
class that he had started down hill, and 
what he could to redeem himself. His 
sin was washed out as far as his father 
was concerned ; but as far as he and they 
were concerned, the sorrow and the ef- 
fects of the sin still stayed by him and 
tempered the joy of his whole life. 

This brings us on to the other side of 
the truth of the fixedness of character ; 
"and the righteousness of the right- 
eous shall be upon him." Now we take 
up the truth of the continuity of human 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

life with a glow of hope and gratitude. 
Every pure thought, true word, and no- 
ble deed turned into the stream of life 
will tend eternally to purify it. Every 
temptation overcome is one step towards 
the victory over another and a greater 
temptation. Every movement towards 
the truth gives a momentum to the life 
which makes the next step more buoyant 
and strong. Ay, have you ever thought of 
it as parents, that your hidden thoughts 
and secret ambitions, if they be spiritual 
and true, are doing something in behalf 
of leading the next generation of children 
towards the truth ? Have you never 
heard one say in excuse for some wrong- 
doing, that it is so easy for So-and-so to 
do right, but so hard for himself ? Have 
you not heard another say, in excuse for 
his selfishness, that it is a wrench for 
him to give, but as for So-and-so it has 
become such a habit that he likes to give ? 
And has it never occurred to you that 
such an excuse is the greatest condem- 
nation that a man can bring upon him- 
self ? The glorious thing about the ease 
of being virtuous, and the pleasure of 
giving, is not that it leads to this or that 
virtuous act, or this or that gift ; but 
49 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

that it is a symptom of the character 
which has for years been tending to- 
wards the higher life and the generous 
impulses, so that when the opportunity 
comes the act is almost automatic. 

One of the leading physiologists of 
this country, in speaking of the incident 
of Sir Philip Sidney dying on the battle- 
field and refusing to take the cup of 
water which another soldier needed, told 
me that he did not think it cost Sir 
Philip Sidney any effort ; in fact, he 
questioned whether Sidney recognized 
the beauty of the act. On my express- 
ing surprise, he said, " Why, the fact is, 
that as a physiologist, I believe that the 
gentle and true life of Sir Philip Sidney, 
his self-restraint and his almost perfect 
poise of character throughout the devel- 
opment of his manhood, had gradually 
led him to a point where he was physi- 
cally, morally, and spiritually so balanced 
that it cost him no effort to do any ac- 
tion which we call heroic. It was auto- 
matic to him, and herein, not in that act 
on the battlefield, but in the nobility of 
his character, is seen the admirable fea- 
ture of Sir Philip Sidney." What a 
glorious thing it would be if we should 
5° 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

only begin now, and determining with 
God's help never to do anything that 
our conscience disapproved, never to 
yield one jot from the purity of our best 
ideals, never to show one sign of moral 
cowardice beneath the scoff or the si- 
lence of our friends, and with all the 
force of our character devote ourselves 
to what is pure, true, lovely, and of good 
report ; and gradually gain such poise of 
character, as we must, if we continue, 
that purity of word and thought will be- 
come automatic, and that every action, 
under the impulse of this leading motive, 
will be towards the highest ideals of life. 
And what is that, my friends, but the 
saying, once and for all, " I am going to 
take Jesus Christ as my example, my 
leader, my Saviour, and my only test of 
character ? From this time forth I am 
going to cut myself off from associations 
which I know are doubtful ; from habits 
which I know are demoralizing, and from 
acts which I know, however much I may 
try to deceive myself, will have their bad 
results in me in the years to come, and I 
am going to devote myself squarely and 
honestly to doing what I believe is right 
in the name of my Master." Do this, 
5 1 



THE FIXEDNESS OF CHARACTER 

ask God's help, lean upon God for your 
support, keep the spirit of Christ beside 
you, and you have given a set to your 
character which will be like the spring 
torrent to the sluggish river. That set 
once made, and your resolution held, you 
will move on through the stream of life, 
ever purer and stronger; and in the 
course of years, who knows what a glori- 
ous manhood will be yours ? 

5 2 



IV 

THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 1 

" He answered and said, Whether he 
be a sinner or no, I know not : one thing 
I know, that, whereas I was blind, now 
I see." 2 

It was a sturdy answer from an honest 
man. In fact, there is, it seems to me, 
no character roughly sketched in the 
Gospel, that exhibits such honest, simple 
and manly traits as does that of the beg- 
gar who spoke these words. He was so 
frank in manner, so true to himself and 
his benefactor, so unassuming in his 
courage and so simple in his faith, that 
we cannot help being attracted to him 
and to a study of the secret of his char- 
acter. 

That morning of the miracle, he had 
waked, as he had every morning from 
the day of his birth, totally blind. He 

1 Appleton Chapel, Harvard University, December 
ii, 1887. 

2 John ix. 25. 

53 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

had groped his way to his customary 
place on the street, where he might most 
successfully touch the pity of the passers 
by. To him, light, color, the beauties of 
nature and of the human face were un- 
known things, except as he had heard 
them described by others. Soon, how- 
ever, a sound of many feet reached his 
ears ; a crowd was approaching. He is, 
before he knows it, the centre of obser- 
vation : for one voice asks, " Master, who 
did sin, this man or his parents, that he 
was born blind ? " The answer comes in 
words and tone that must have sent a 
thrill through him : " Neither hath this 
man sinned, nor his parents : but that the 
works of God should be made manifest 
in him." " As long as I am in the world, 
I am the Light of the world." He feels 
upon his eyes the touch of the marvel- 
ous stranger ; he goes without question, 
almost without thought, to Siloam, 
washes, and on the moment the sun 
flashes into his eyes. Bewildered, al- 
most stunned, he starts to return, when 
down comes the crowd upon him ; neigh- 
bors whose voices are so familiar and 
whose faces are so strange, Pharisees, 
all kinds, press on him with their hur- 
54 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

lied questions: "How were thine eyes 
opened ? " " Who opened thine eyes ? " 
" Where is he ? " " Is this, after all, the 
same man?" "What sayest thou of 
him ? " " It is the sabbath ; the healer 
must be a sinner to heal on the sabbath 
day." Pressed, dazed, the man holds 
firmly to one fact. Those questions he 
cannot answer, where he is, who he is. 
" Whether he be a sinner or no, I know 
not." One fact in his own experience 
he does know, and he will stand by that 
whatever comes : " But one thing I know, 
that whereas I was blind, now I see." 
No questions or threats can make him 
deny that. That one fact was in this 
crisis and bewilderment his salvation, for 
it was one from his own experience. 

This, then, is what I think stands at 
the bottom of the man's character, his 
appreciation of the worth of one fact 
from his own experience. Our study to- 
day is therefore the worth of one fact 
founded upon our own spiritual experi- 
ence. 

Looking back over many young peo- 
ple's early religious life, I think that a 
rough sketch of their growth may be 
something like this. The Bible and its 
55 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

lessons are learned in childhood. They 
are, of course, accepted on the authority 
of our parents or teacher. The child 
grows into maturity. On the same au- 
thority the creeds are learned and re- 
peated Sunday by Sunday. The ideas 
on inspiration, prayer, and many other 
truths are all accepted, and the boy, now 
a young man, is called a pattern Chris- 
tian and a loyal Churchman. The fond 
hope of parent or teacher is that he is 
going through life without a suspicion 
of doubt, holding to these truths which 
have never by any experience of his own 
become a part of himself ; they have just 
as little to do with his own inner spir- 
itual experience, if he takes them merely 
on the authority of others, as has his 
knowledge of geography or history which 
he learned at the same time. 

Sometimes that fond hope is fulfilled. 
The boy grows into manhood, and, as he 
grows, he accepts the truths just as they 
were given him ; he never questions one 
of them, and by his own spiritual experi- 
ence he makes them a part of himself. 
His is an exceptional and a placid, happy 
experience, without the rough usage, the 
anxieties, the disappointments of a spir- 

56 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

itual struggle, and (we must also add) 
without its satisfaction and its hard won 
victories. 

Far different from that placid life is 
the experience of most young men in 
these days. 

We have had those truths given us. 
We have accepted them without deep 
thought. We have lived on in the com- 
fortable sense that we were all right ; we 
know what a man ought to believe, and 
what the church through her teachers 
has told us to believe. The system all 
seems so nice and strong and respect- 
able — no deep thought necessary — just 
take the truths and theories as they come. 

But some day we wake, we say our 
prayers as usual, we begin our daily 
work ; when suddenly or gradually the 
whole thing seems to have changed. An 
acquaintance comes along and asks, 
" How can God answer a man's prayer?" 
" How can He change his laws for one 
insignificant atom calling himself a 
man ? " We had not thought of it in 
that way ; we had not thought at all, in 
fact ; we had been used to saying our 
prayers. " It is the right thing to do, all 
good people do it," we answer, " and — 
57 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

well" — we have to confess ourselves 
defeated. 

Or, in the subject of inspiration of 
the Bible. We know what we have been 
taught ; but the questioner presses in ; 
we confess that " we do not see how 
every word is inspired ; it certainly does 
seem as if there must be some differ- 
ences of statement between different de- 
scriptions of the same scene. Yes ; our 
ideas cannot exactly meet the facts ; we 
shall have to find out about it — and — 
well," again we are pushed to surrender. 

So the story goes; one or another of 
those beliefs that we had thought so 
strong and true is hit, and for aught that 
we can see, riddled at the first fire. 

But the real danger is, not that we 
shall let that one belief go, but as that 
is wrapped up as part and parcel with 
our whole system, we shall, in our first 
bewilderment, let the whole thing go 
without striking a blow in its defence. 
Because the enemy have knocked in some 
ancient and shaky wall around the be- 
sieged city, is no reason for the garrison 
in the well-tried and strongly armed cit- 
adel to become demoralized and try to 
escape with their lives. 
58 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

Yet this is what we see every day. 

A man, because he has had his faith 
shaken in one or two of his childhood 
beliefs, immediately calls himself a 
doubter, as if there were something 
praiseworthy in the fact that he has sur- 
rendered without a blow that which he 
is bound to hold as long as he consist- 
ently can. 

Another, who has running in his veins 
generations of Christian blood, whose 
whole tone and best traits of character 
come from a Christian, praying, God- 
fearing lineage, finds himself puzzled, 
even bewildered. He cannot answer the 
questions that press in on him : how a 
just God can allow such misery as man 
sometimes endures, or why He permits 
sin. His brain cannot solve the infinite ; 
and so " he knows nothing," he says, " he 
makes no pretensions to know or believe 
anything above or beyond the facts of 
life," as he calls them ; as if God work- 
ing in man were not a fact of life. He 
revels in the name of Agnostic, as if 
there were some peculiar charm in a 
man's thus easily throwing off all 
thought of deeper, spiritual subjects. 

Do not understand me as saying that 
59 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

there are not men of honest, earnest, 
and noble character who, in a most con- 
scientious and courageous way, give up 
beliefs in which they have been educated 
and set themselves outside of all posi- 
tively spiritual faiths. But I do also say 
that there is a vast amount of weakness 
and cowardice in men, who, because they 
have lost something of their old belief, 
without the trouble of stopping to think, 
throw the whole thing overboard, and 
then take it upon themselves to sneer 
at those who have the mental balance 
and courage to hold on to what they have 
until they see good reason to drop it. It 
is not always the honest believer who 
is shallow in thought and weak in action, 
as some would have us think. Far from 
it. 

But when a young man finds himself 
in such a crisis as we have suggested, 
when certain ideas have got to go, and 
he is becoming bewildered, what can he 
do ? What is there to save him ? 

That which saved the man from the 
questions of that pushing crowd ; one fact 
caught from our own spiritual experi- 
ence. It makes but little matter what 
that fact is, provided only that it is our 
60 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

own, inwrought into our own thought 
and life. We must be able to say, " One 
thing I know," and I tell you it is an 
immense safety to really know even only 
one thing. To know, for instance, by 
your own experience, that it is right 
every time to do right, and wrong every 
time to do wrong, is an anchor that holds 
many a man from drifting into utter 
recklessness in life ; — to know that 
whatever be the questions about prayer, 
prayer does give comfort, help, and in- 
spiration ; — to know by your own self 
that whatever be the theory of inspira- 
tion, there is a something in the Bible 
that has helped you as nothing else ever 
did ; — to have tested, not through the 
authority of another, but in our own life, 
the real comfort and satisfaction in the 
forgiveness of one of our sins through 
faith in Jesus Christ. To have only one 
such experience to fall back upon, to be 
so convinced of its reality to us, that we 
can say that that is one thing which 
we know, even though the whole world 
gainsaid it, is to have a hold on spiritual 
things which is of inestimable value. 

Do not believe the theory that religion 
is a mere matter of the feelings, a blind 
61 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

unassured trust in something that no 
one has ever seen, and that therefore 
has no reality and no certainty. No! 
faith is the evidence of things not seen, 
and to the man of faith it is as good as 
if he had seen. 

Granted, then, that we are ready and 
glad to hold on to even one well-earned 
spiritual fact, — what will be the effect 
on us, on our questioners, and on the 
truth ? 

In the first place, it sifts our faith in 
such a way that we immediately recog- 
nize what is our own faith, and what is 
that which we thought was our own, but 
in fact was not. 

When a man has been living beyond 
his means, and has mortgaged his house 
and other property, and then meets a 
financial crisis, he soon finds what is his 
and what is another's ; he comes down 
to hard facts, and it is a good thing for 
him. He would have been glad to put 
off the evil day of bankruptcy, but it had 
to come, and, in truth, the earlier the 
better. 

When a man has been living on a 
faith that is not his own, and meets a 
62 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

spiritual crisis, what was not his disap- 
pears ; but that which is his, which by 
experience he had made his own, stands 
out sharp and clear and true. Some 
would have the crisis put off ; there are 
timid spirits that would keep a man 
from thinking and questioning lest the 
crisis should come. No ! it will come ; 
and it is well that it should come before 
the enthusiasms of life are over. 

How that sifting does humble a man ! 
how honest it makes him ! Before it, 
there was nothing he did not pretend 
to know and believe. He could tell you 
all about religion. You know men who 
have the whole thing systematized. 
There is no question of the deep things 
of God, of the Saviour, of inspiration, 
nothing in heaven above or the earth 
beneath, that they cannot tell you all 
about, at least to their own satisfaction. 
To confess ignorance of anything seems 
to them equal to a confession of defeat. 
But the man who has passed the crisis 
is questioned : " How does the Spirit 
touch the heart of man ? " " Where are 
heaven and hell ? " " We know that Jesus 
was only an enthusiast, self-deceived." 
How sturdy the answer, " Whether that 

63 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

be true or not, I do not pretend to say : 
how many things may be reconciled I do 
not know ; but there are a few facts 
which are to me as my life, that I do 
know, and no questionings or sneers 
can take them from me." The man is 
thus toned up in humility and honesty, 
ready to confess ignorance, no less ready 
and quick to insist on what is to him the 
truth. 

Another effect is seen in the story of 
the man. Those questions of the neigh- 
bors turn into open hostility ; the Phari- 
sees have taken the matter up ; the 
healer is a sinner for healing on the 
sabbath day ; therefore the healed man 
must be thrown out of the synagogue, 
excommunicated, cut off from friends 
and old associations. With what quiet, 
modest courage he bears himself! It 
was the courage born of firm conviction, 
a conviction founded on facts. 

It is the same story, told a thousand 
times. Science changes its methods 
from theory to a study of facts ; and with 
what quiet confidence may she then 
throw down all theories and superstitions 
that do not conform to the facts ! 

St. Peter, before the Resurrection, 
64 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

may deny his Master ; but once sure 
of the fact of the Resurrection, that 
same Peter will calmly face and rebuke 
a whole city of Jews and murderers. 
It is the conviction of a few simple, 
but very deep truths that has sent the 
missionaries all over the world, that has 
put courage into thousands of men's 
hearts, and has given every martyr 
that has ever died for Christ his assur- 
ance. 

The creed that we recite every Sun- 
day, called the Apostles' Creed, is simply 
a statement of facts ; no theorizing, no 
inferences, but truths direct from the 
Scriptures, and more than that, capable 
of coming direct from every believer's 
heart. Because our Church has these 
facts for her foundation, and no elaborate 
form of belief for her members, we know 
that she must be a church of courage 
and missionary spirit. But to come to 
ourselves. We have these questions 
pressed on us : " You really do not think 
the Christian religion is necessary to 
civilization, do you ? " " Has n't the day 
for Christianity about passed ? " Ay ! 
the questioners burst forth into Phari- 
saic hostility. " Jesus is not even the 
65 



THE WORTH OF ONE FACT 

ideal man ; his religion is a block, a hin- 
drance to civilization. Away with it ! " 

How is that to be met ? Only by 
quiet, unmoved courage that will dare to 
assert its conviction in the simple truths 
of Christ's religion, that whatever comes 
will be ready to say, " I know" and that 
will be ready to stand by its convictions. 

I am not speaking of the future ; but 
now, in these very days, just that cour- 
ageous spirit is wanted in our different 
walks of life, in society, in conversation, 
in our student life ; a spirit to simply 
state its faith, whatever that may be, and 
firmly live up to it. 

One other result must follow. What- 
ever the faith may be, however limited, 
if it is a man's own and lived up to, it 
will be sure to increase. 

You may see this by one last look at 
that man's experience. He was turned 
out of the synagogue, friendless and 
homeless, but content with his one con- 
viction, even though he had never seen 
his healer. 

The Saviour seeks him out and asks 

him, "Dost thou believe on the Son of 

God ? " " Who is He, Lord, that I might 

believe on Him ? " i-s the answer. Jesus 

66 



THE WORTH OF OXE FACT 

says to him, " Thou hast both seen him, 
and it is he that talketh with thee." 
" Lord, I believe," and he worshipped 
Him. 

Because he had that one truth, he was 
sure to be led on to higher truths. 

Faith is not a thing that can stand 
still ; it must grow or die. One convic- 
tion must lead on to another, or the first 
will in time be lost. If a man stands by 
the truth he has, some day, in some 
form, Christ, who is the Truth, will pour 
into his heart another and another. If 
a man has faith enough to do His will, 
he shall know of the doctrine. Never be 
content, then, to live and believe only 
just and exactly what you believe to-day ; 
look for higher and larger things, a 
deeper faith, a stronger assurance, and 
a firmer hope. Jesus has promised that 
he who seeks shall find, and He keeps 
his promises. He who has given you 
one truth, will, if you are honest and 
earnest, if you live courageously up to 
that truth, lead you on and on, through 
this life and the next, into all Truth. 

6 7 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 1 

There are few chapters in the Old 
Testament so full of interest and action, 
so infused with faith and the martial 
spirit, as are those of the patriot Nehe- 
miah. 

Let me recall one incident. 

Nehemiah, who happened at the time 
to be the cupbearer of King Artaxerxes, 
in his palace in Shushan, hundreds of 
miles away from his old home, Jerusa- 
lem, heard by chance from certain Jews 
of the desperate condition of that once 
royal city, the walls broken down, the 
gates burned, the people dispirited and 
in great affliction and reproach. 

His spirit of patriotism and religion 
was touched. First brooding over the 
matter, then seeking the king, he ob- 
tained leave of absence for a certain 
length of time, collected the letters 

1 Appleton Chapel, Harvard University, Decem- 
ber 7, 1890. 

68 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

necessary to pass him through the inter- 
vening countries, made a forced journey, 
and in three days was in Jerusalem. No 
sooner there than under the cover of 
night he made a close inspection of the 
walls, the gates, and the surrounding 
country. Then, amidst the scoffs of the 
people outside, he roused all classes of 
citizens to a high pitch of enthusiasm ; 
he set priests and merchants, apotheca- 
ries and goldsmiths, nobles and artisans 
at work, each man and family in their 
given place. Soon, to the chagrin of 
the enemy, the walls began to rise, the 
gates to be set up, and the city strength- 
ened. Now those without awoke and 
surrounded the city with a large force ; 
the builders had to become fighters ; 
they that builded and they that bare bur- 
dens with one hand wrought in the work, 
and with the other hand held a weapon. 

Moreover the walls were long and the 
garrison very small. They had to make 
up in strategy what they lacked in force. 
The soldiers were scattered along the 
wall, and a system of signals was organ- 
ized. Then, wherever an assault was 
made by the enemy, there the garri- 
son near by would collect, in order to 

6 9 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

strengthen the force of their comrades. 
" In what place, therefore (so goes the 
order), ye hear the sound of the trumpet, 
resort ye thither to us : our God shall 
fight for us." 1 

The scene and the spirit of the defence 
seem to me, my friends, to have some 
suggestions for our thought this morn- 
ing. For in these days of questioning, 
and of open hostility to religion, the call 
goes forth to every Christian to study 
more carefully than ever the spiritual 
condition of the Church and of ourselves, 
and the problem for us is, in what spirit 
should that be done, and the citadel de- 
fended from her spiritual enemies and 
ours. The one point that I want to 
impress is, the necessity of thoughtful 
skill in the plans and method of our de- 
fence, in strengthening those parts where 
the assault of evil is the strongest. 

I need not remind you, who are famil- 
iar with the story of the temptation in 
the wilderness, of the consummate skill 
with which the enemy of Christ was 
met ; how there was given blow for 
blow, Scripture quotation for Scripture 
quotation, an answer to every question ; 

1 Nehemiah iv. 20. 
70 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

how, as the evil power bent all his 
strength on one point and then on an- 
other, the Saviour marshalled his spirit- 
ual forces just when and where they were 
wanted, and how the arch enemy retired 
vanquished, at least for a season. That 
scene is typical of the method of his 
whole life. He is a superficial student 
who thinks that Jesus went here and 
there without thought or plan, and 
praised this man and denounced that 
one, simply as they happened before 
Him. There was in our Lord's life no 
careless action, no wasted power. 

That the Church, however, has not al- 
ways retained that skill and thoughtful 
method of the Master, it does not take a 
deep study of the past to discover. 

The student of history will find that 
in every age certain evils were creep- 
ing into, and gaining possession of the 
Church, while the trumpet-blast of her 
leaders was calling all the thought and 
action of the Church in just the oppo- 
site direction. When bishops and theo- 
logians have been bending their whole 
force upon some question of the exact 
form of union between the persons of 
the Godhead, or the distinction between 
7* 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

the human and the divine in Jesus, pa- 
ganism, with its horde of degrading influ- 
ences, has been rushing in at another 
gate. When some question of ecclesias- 
tical government or supremacy has oc- 
cupied the Church's thoughts, elements 
have been gathering which would, if they 
had been looked to, have created a panic 
in the quiet or argumentative council 
chambers. It is marvellous, sometimes, 
to see how dull or prejudiced or blind 
the leaders of the Church seem to have 
been. Such immense wastes of power, 
such loss of opportunities, such mis- 
directed but well-intended action. 

And yet, as we have seen lately in the 
discussions of the battles of our war, it 
is always easy to be wise after the fight, 
easy to criticise the methods and actions 
of the leaders when the smoke is cleared 
and the strength or weakness of the en- 
emy presented in a careful map before 
us. It is as easy to laugh at the immense 
tomes of theology that lumber the shelves 
of our libraries, at those long ago fights 
and discussions and formulas, as it is to 
laugh at the old forts of the Revolution, 
and the cannon which adorn our com- 
mons and monuments. But useless and 
72 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

ungainly as they now are, they did their 
work, and most of it good work, in their 
day. They are interesting in themselves, 
and helpful in the development of new 
forms for new exigencies. Each of our 
creeds bears the scars of many a fight, 
and has, within it, principles on which 
the fight against false doctrines and evil 
powers must continue to be carried on. 

We have, however, dwelt long enough 
in the past. 

The Church of to-day is for the life of 
to-day ; her skill is seen in the way that 
she uses the principles won in the past 
for the present work. And what is that 
work ? 

To hear some good Church people talk, 
one would think that the final object 
of the Church is to have a dignified ser- 
vice, an interesting minister, and a com- 
fortable and handsome building ; or an 
elaborately organized parish with a so- 
ciety for every need and emergency pos- 
sible, or a correct idea of the forms of 
the ritual and order of the Church. All 
of these, and many other good things of 
which we hear much, have their impor- 
tance : they are all means to a certain 
73 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

end. The danger is, lest we pay so 
much attention to the means, to the 
sharpening and polishing of our instru- 
ments, that we forget the great work, 
the upbuilding of the walls, and the 
defence. If the whole thought, talk, 
and force of the Church could be brought 
to bear upon one thing, the foundation 
thing, on the person of Jesus Christ ; if 
in these days we — you and I and all in 
the Church — should cease pressing our 
pet notions, or discussing our ideas on 
this or that method, should cease preach- 
ing ourselves, and turn thought, word, 
and life to the preaching of Jesus Christ 
and him crucified, the fact that not only 
Jesus Christ did live to warn, help, and 
heal men in Palestine, but now liveth to 
warn, help, and heal us ; that He is now 
waiting and watching for our confession 
of duty neglected and entrance on new 
duties begun, as He waited and watched 
of old ; that He is as grieved with our 
cowardly denials of Him, as He was with 
that of Peter ; that He is bearing the 
load of our sin, — if the Church should 
preach and realize that, there would be 
no question that her walls had been 
strengthened in these days. 
74 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

The trumpet has sounded in these last 
twenty years, and has called the thought 
of the Church to the person of Christ ; 
and she has responded. The strength 
of the Church and the evidence of her 
truth is now felt, not so much in the 
fact that miracles were performed by 
Christ, or that the canon of Scripture 
cannot be broken, or that the truth of His 
system can be exactly proved, as in the 
fact that Jesus Christ lived : His Life, not 
His words alone, or His miracles alone, 
or His resurrection alone, but His Life as 
a whole, in all its humility, grace, beauty, 
and power, in all its confessions of union 
with God, and in its perfect sympathy 
with man, from Birth to Ascension, was 
and is the miracle for which no other 
system can account. Impress that Life 
on men, burn the story of the Cross into 
their hearts, and you have given them 
the one power which will enable them to 
break with all their evil associations. 
You have recreated them. 

If, then, the people of the Church — 
if you and I — turn our thoughts intently 
on the person of Christ, we cannot es- 
cape two truths, the two truths which 
75 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

He placed above ail others. First, the 
truth of God the Father. 

To-day we are largely materialists. 
In other ages there may have been too 
many spiritualists ; but to-day there is 
no question that we as a people believe 
most strongly in what we can see, feel 
and handle. We believe in the power 
of brains, muscle, material resources, and 
money. The study of nature need not 
lead to a want of spirituality, but a close 
and intent study of nature often does 
shut out the spiritual side of things. As 
a result, while thinking, busy, and prac- 
tical men admire and reverence many of 
the traits of Jesus of Nazareth, they 
know little or nothing of the spiritual 
forces behind Him. The whole drift of 
the thought and action is such as to cre- 
ate, not so much a denial as a simple 
thoughtlessness of, and indifference to, 
spiritual truths. In the theory of many, 
a God somehow exists ; but that a hea- 
venly Father now lives, loves, and longs 
for the love of His children, — that the 
spirit of God moving in men's hearts 
and lives, though they know it not, is 
the great force in the world to-day, — is 
a truth totally alien to their ways of look- 

7 6 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

ing at things. This agnosticism, not of 
thoughtfulness, but of thoughtlessness, 
is not to be reasoned away, for men are 
not interested enough to reason and 
think in those lines ; it can only be 
pushed away by breathing into the life 
of men more of the spiritual spirit, more 
of the faith in faith and love and higher 
graces than they now have. In other 
words, the practical business man, the 
clerk, the student, the workingman, any 
one who, while intently interested in his 
work and pleasure, shows by the tenor 
of his life that he is living by faith and 
not by sight ; that he really believes in a 
heavenly Father, and the deeper spiritual 
truths of Christ, — such a man is doing 
more to offset and overthrow practical 
and indifferent unbelief than many an 
earnest champion of the faith in our 
books and reviews. 

The second is the truth of man, the 
brother: "No man liveth to himself, 
and no man dieth to himself." 

The man who believes only in the 
worth and power of material things, 
reasonably, puts his whole life into the 
gaining of them. His first duty is to 
himself ; his last duty is to his fellow- 
77 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

man : he is logical and true to his princi- 
ples. The society in which that spirit is 
the ruling power logically expects every 
man to look out for himself, and, except 
as a matter of policy and self-defence, 
for no one else. Let this spirit of self- 
ishness gain full control of all grades 
of society, without that tempering spirit 
which comes with religion and faith in 
spiritual truths, and we shall have a 
labor question, and a social question, and 
a political question, to which our pre- 
sent troubles are but whispers. " Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself " is a 
word which no Christian can get rid of ; 
it is a word which must be interpreted 
with reason and common sense ; but the 
principle is there. The fact that each 
member of society and each class of 
society suspects each other, member 
and class, of selfish motives is that 
which keeps society in a ferment ; and 
the trouble is, there is only too much 
ground for the suspicion. Men have 
been and are supremely selfish. All 
classes have at different times unjustly 
demanded rights and held power which a 
Christian spirit would have yielded. Con- 
sequently, every sharp contrast of riches 
78 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

and poverty intensifies the suspicion, 
and the man who spends his ten thou- 
sand dollars for a few inches of bric-a- 
brac, and the laborer who, in combina- 
tion with a thousand others, has struck 
in the next street at what they think 
are starvation wages, naturally eye each 
other with some suspicion. No instan- 
taneous cure will remedy the matter. It 
is the spirit of Christ, of tender regard for 
others, of high justice and sympathetic 
humanity, that our lives want ; and it is 
to the Church, — to the members of the 
Church in their business relations, the 
treatment of their employees in their 
shops and factories and their servants in 
their houses, — to us that the world looks 
for the noblest expressions of it. In 
that breach of the principle of the bro- 
therhood of mankind in Christ, of Chris- 
tian charity, the trumpet sounds to-day, 
"Resort ye thither." 

The battle-cry of the text has its more 
personal suggestion. Each man and 
woman is called to stand on the defence 
against their peculiar enemy, and to en- 
force themselves in their weak spot. 
The trouble is that it is far easier to 
79 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

enforce ourselves in our strongest spot. 
The temptation of a thoughtless ath- 
lete is to strengthen his muscles where 
they are already the strongest, and thus 
gain preeminence in some special line. 
The skilled athlete will turn his thought 
and force on to the weaker part, and 
thus develop the whole man in perfect 
symmetry and strength. The healthy 
system sends the blood leaping to that 
part where it is wanted. The sickly 
body will not respond to the call for aid 
in its weaker part. 

That spiritual system, that man who 
is in a spiritually healthy condition, will 
turn the whole strength to his weaker 
parts. Yet how often is the case re- 
versed ! 

The man who is always ready to give 
money, but seldom patient, and often 
irritable, says that he will turn over a 
new leaf and be a better man ; and he 
sits down and writes off his generous 
checks in the satisfaction that he is keep- 
ing away the spirit of selfishness. But 
his form of selfishness is in impatience 
and irritability ; there is the weak point 
in his garrison. 

The church - going worldly woman 
80 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

keeps Lent by multiplying her attend- 
ance at services, and pins her salvation 
on regular attendance at early commun- 
ion ; but her weak point, a worldly or an 
envious spirit, goes uncorrected. 

The boy makes his good resolutions 
to be good and not to lose his temper, 
which he very seldom does lose, and for- 
gets to control his tongue, that unruly 
member, from impure words. 

And so with all of us. The skill of 
the patriot Nehemiah was in discovering 
where the weak spot was on the ap- 
proach of the enemy; then any man 
could marshal the forces. The hard part 
is often to look really honestly at our- 
selves and into our own deepest motives, 
to discover what is the root of selfish- 
ness, and then what form it takes. That 
done, the warning sounded, the whole 
spiritual force of the man turned to that 
weak spot, the fight earnest, and there 
will be no question of the result ; for he 
who so acts has the assurance, " Our 
God shall fight for us." 

There is one element which I feel is 

wanting sadly in the Church, and in the 

Christian character in these times. Of 

this I would finally speak. On the 

81 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

whole, the methods of the Church in 
these days are good, the thought and 
truths of the Gospel are well supported. 
Everything seems ready for a more ag- 
gressive fight against the thoughtful and 
practical enemies of to-day. Still we 
hesitate, and do not move as we ought ; 
many of our weapons are useless ; our 
work is not effective, for want of one 
thing, enthusiasm born of a personal 
faith. 

Some of you may have read the story 
told by a private in our war. In the 
midst of the battle, the plans all laid 
and in execution, the action hot, one of 
those critical moments when the turn 
depends not on numbers but on the con- 
fidence and courage of the men, he could 
feel the courage of himself and his com- 
rades oozing out. The odds were against 
them ; a retreat, perhaps a rout, seemed 
inevitable, when the figure of Hancock 
was seen moving slowly in front of the 
line, every inch of him a soldier. The 
response to his look and word was im- 
mediate. The whole line took courage, 
rose, advanced and drove back the enemy. 
I say that we have all the material, all 
the plans and methods necessary; we 
82 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

have numbers enough. What we do 
want is something of that spiritual en- 
thusiasm. It is more than emotion ; it 
is thought, act, and life kindled with that 
spiritual enthusiasm born of a personal 
loyalty to the noblest of leaders. Not 
that the man has got hold of some truth, 
but that the truth of Christ has got hold 
of him, and sets him ablaze to kindle 
that truth in another's life. 

You say that your friend is indifferent 
to religion ; that he has no particular 
faith ; he never goes to church. You 
know also, that it has not come alto- 
gether from thought in the matter ; he 
has simply drifted, thoughtless. He 
merely cares for none of these things. 
Argument is not going to touch that 
man. Worship and sermons will not 
move him, for he avoids them. Books 
will not convince him, for he skips all 
that hints at religion. The only thing 
that will touch him is your own spiritual 
enthusiasm. If you are loyal to Christ, 
if you believe in Him as the only hope 
of your life and of this world, then you 
have a duty by your friend which you 
cannot escape. There is not one of us 
in whom the trumpet call is not for more 

83 



A SKILFUL DEFENCE 

enthusiasm. First, seek for yourself a 
deeper realization of the truth of Christ ; 
seek it earnestly and with prayer ; with 
short prayers if you will, but with earnest 
ones ; then live in the spirit of Christ. 
Use tact in word and action, but be not 
over sensitive ; an earnest man has some- 
times to push his way and break down 
others' prejudices. And if you are in 
earnest and with high enthusiasm, others 
will feel it ; they must. Though they 
say little, they will think. Then, if you 
continue faithful and sincere, " our God 
shall fight for us." Leave the result 
with Him ; your work is done. 
84 



VI 

THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND THE 
CHANGEABLENESS OF FAITH 1 

"Then came the Jews round about 
him, and said unto him, How long dost 
thou make us to doubt ? If thou be the 
Christ, tell us plainly. Jesus answered 
them, I told you and ye believed not : 
the works that I do in my Father's 
name, they bear witness of me. But ye 
believe not because ye are not of my 
sheep, as I said unto you. My sheep 
hear my voice, and I know them, and 
they follow me." 2 

When a man asks a plain and honest 
question, should he not get a plain and 
direct answer ? I think that there are 
some of us who at first thought have a 
little doubt in our minds as to whether 
those people were treated quite fairly by 

1 St. John's Memorial Chapel, Cambridge, Nov- 
ember 20, 1892. Christ Church, Cambridge, before 
the St. Paul's Society of Harvard University, May 
26, 1895. 

2 John x. 24-27. 

85 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

our Lord. Here was a man who had 
appeared in the community, and who was 
certainly worthy of their notice. The 
people had been brought up for gener- 
ations in expectation of a Messiah, a 
Christ, a deliverer. Certain features 
about this man, His miracles, His claims 
and the claims of His followers for Him, 
certain incidents in connection with His 
birth and early career, the driving of 
traders out of the Temple just two years 
ago on that very Feast day, naturally 
provoked the question, " Is not this the 
Messiah ? Have we not, right here 
among us, the Christ whom we have 
been expecting ? " 

What more natural and honorable 
thing to do than to go directly to Him 
with the question, " How long dost thou 
make us to doubt ? How long wilt thou 
hold us in suspense ? If thou be the 
Christ, tell us plainly." 

Why could not Jesus give them a di- 
rect answer ? Why did He throw them 
off in that evasive way, and begin to 
talk of His sheep ? I think that we can 
best answer the question by suggesting 
an illustration or two from our own ex- 
perience in these days. 
86 



THE CHANGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

I have said that we sympathize a good 
deal with those straightforward business- 
like men who, in asking a definite ques- 
tion, expect a definite answer. For we 
are after all a straightforward and busi- 
ness-like people in this age. We live on 
facts, and like to get at results. 

When a new metal is discovered, or 
a new chrysanthemum cultivated, we 
can describe its characteristics, name it, 
label it, and when the definite question is 
asked, " What is this new discovery?" 
we can give a definite answer. And 
ten years hence we can give the same 
answer. It will always be found exactly 
the same, in the catalogue of metals or 
of flowers. 

And so in our business-like and scien- 
tific way we begin to think that every 
thing can be defined, labelled, and put 
in a case, hermetically sealed against 
changing atmospheres of thought and 
discussion. 

Once in a while, however, some great 
living principle arises which knocks over 
all these pleasant notions of preserving 
truth in unchanging forms and defini- 
tions. 

In science, some genius who has the 
87 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

power of classifying other men's facts, 
some one with the patience and imagina- 
tion of a Darwin, arises : and from the 
din of scientific discussion appears the 
word and the principle of evolution. 
We do not know exactly how it has 
come, but here it is ; and immediately 
ten thousand voices ask " What is evolu- 
tion ? what does the evolutionist hold ? " 
And you who have lived in the thought 
of the last twenty years know how, as 
soon as that term was defined, as it was 
supposed by some forever, it has needed 
a re-definition. 

Some new fact or class of facts, some 
importation of philosophic or religious 
truth into the discussion, has given the 
term a larger meaning. So that as it 
expresses the results of vital thought 
and experience, as it is the revelation of 
a living principle, it cannot be defined 
and confined to one interpretation, but is 
ever growing larger, and embracing more 
and more of thought and life in its com- 
pass. Thus the evolutionist of to-day is 
broader in his vision than the evolution- 
ist of five years ago, and narrower than 
he will be five years hence. 

The most misleading thing, therefore, 
88 



THE CHANGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

that science could do to-day would be to 
give a definite, plain, business-like an- 
swer to the plain question, " How long is 
science to hold us in suspense ? Why 
cannot we have a final answer to our 
question, ' What is this principle of evo- 
lution ? ' " 

Now I believe that we are ready to 
go back to our text with more intelli- 
gence, and see how impossible it was for 
Jesus to give a direct answer to the 
direct question : for the more definite 
and final His answer, the more mislead- 
ing it would have been. 

These people, you notice, were Jews : 
"Then came the Jews round about him." 

It was at the Feast of Dedication. It 
was an anniversary of liberty, when was 
celebrated the breaking of the Syrian 
yoke by the great leader, Judas Mac- 
cabaeus. It was a day that appealed to 
the Jewish national pride, when the 
Roman yoke galled most bitterly. Their 
dreams and hope were of another and 
greater than Maccabaeus, a Messiah, who 
would break the power of Rome and 
make Jerusalem the queen of all nations, 
and the Jews the victors of all people. 
Jesus was the Messiah. But as He well 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

knew, and as we now know, He repre- 
sented infinitely more than Messiahship. 

To have answered that He was the 
Christ would have been to set those Jews 
upon entirely the wrong track. The 
word " Christ " did not mean the same 
thing to Him and them. He was not 
the Christ as they understood it. To 
have said " Yes " would in fact have 
been a false answer as they would have 
interpreted it. To have said " No " 
would also have been false, for He was 
the Christ, and He could not deny Him- 
self. 

And, after all, He had told them, or 
rather tried to tell them. He had in 
vain repeated some of the eternal prin- 
ciples beneath the Messiahship : " I and 
my Father are one," " I came forth from 
the Father," " I am the Light of the 
World : " but they believed not ; they did 
not have the spiritual capacity to take it 
in ; even the works that He did had no 
spiritual meaning to them. They were 
as hopeless to impress with the truth of 
his Messiahship as is the ignorant clod- 
hopper to comprehend the great princi- 
ples involving nature, man, and spirit, 
under the term "evolution." 
90 



THE CIIAXGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

Yet there is among us all, even among 
the very religious, the feeling that reli- 
gious truths can be finally and adequately 
denned and settled, so that when the 
answers to the great questions of God, 
of the Trinity, of the Scriptures, or of 
the future life, are once made, they are 
settled forever. There are those of us 
who think of the faith once delivered to 
the saints as a neatly packed system of 
truths, all dovetailed and mortised into 
each other, defined and numbered, so 
that when one has once grasped it, he 
has it forever in the same form. No ! 
the truth of Jesus Christ is no dead 
thing, but living, vital, developing with 
every income of new thought and expe- 
rience. 

Take, for instance, that truth, the in- 
spiration of the Bible. Our fathers de- 
fined it, as they thought, forever. The 
Bible was the Word of God ; every word 
and letter inspired, and equally inspired 
by Him ; one fact wrong, and the whole 
would fall. To the doubting world cry- 
ing, " How long dost thou hold us in 
suspense ? Tell us, what is inspiration ? " 
they gave a compact, definite, and satis- 
factory answer ; satisfactory to them. 
9i 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

But we all know how the revelation of 
God's truth in the very Scriptures them- 
selves, in men's experiences and in the 
study of nature, has burst those old defi- 
nitions. How new ones have been 
formed, and how, again, the living truth 
has broken the shell ! What shall we 
say ? Is the Bible not inspired ? Is it 
not God's word ? Surely it is both of 
these. His Spirit moved in the hearts 
and lives of those men of old. He was 
beneath the movements of races and na- 
tions. He was in the history of all those 
peoples, from Abraham, through Isaiah, 
to Malachi. He, Himself, was in Christ 
Jesus, and breathed upon the apostles. 
What, then, those men did and wrote 
was inspired of God, — not all that they 
did and wrote. Some of their wicked 
deeds and words seem to have been in- 
spired by Satan. They had their times 
of spiritual despondency as we do ; they 
were not equally inspired. We may de- 
fine inspiration to-day. Our definition 
is larger, nobler, and more divine than 
our fathers' definition. Our children's, 
we trust, will be nobler than ours. 

And yet, in this very point, Christian 
people still cling to the fact that what 
92 



THE CHANGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

our fathers defined must be so. It is 
just here that the irreverent and Phi- 
listine spirit of Ingersollism and the 
scientific spirit of Huxleyism has its 
leverage. 

They take Christians at their word, 
that the forms of faith change not, and 
that the truth must always be defined as 
the truth always has been ; and they easily 
riddle the old systems, which did good 
work in their day, but which have already 
given way to others. Such interpreta- 
tions are as intelligent as if the theolo- 
gian should base an argument against 
modern science on the grounds of the 
definitions of scientists of one hundred 
years ago. 

Or, again, the question of the Resur- 
rection. 

You know the popular belief of fifty 
years ago, — the soul transported into 
unknown regions ; the body resting in 
the ground ; the great day when all the 
particles of the flesh would gather and 
become again the home of the soul, and 
the man would stand ready for judgment. 

You know how the more intelligent 
study of St. Paul's words, of our Lord's 
resurrection, and the more spiritual 
93 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

interpretation of nature, have glorified 
the truth, cut away the pagan notion, of 
the immortal formless soul, and inter- 
preted man as one, soul and body ; and 
how the resurrection is the entering 
into the higher life with spiritualized 
aspiration and form. Very imperfect, 
our definition, you say. Yes, gloriously 
imperfect, with every new revelation of 
truth to be made more perfect. 

" Do you believe in the resurrection 
of the body ? Tell us plainly. Does the 
Church ask us to believe it ? Give me a 
final answer, that will settle my doubts 
and free me from thinking any more 
about it." 

Can we answer definitely and in a 
word ? 

We say "Yes." Ah, — but what do 
you mean by the body, by the resurrec- 
tion ; and we are misunderstood. We 
say " No," — not the exact unchanged 
body that was laid in the ground, and 
yet we believe in the resurrection of the 
body ; and again we are misunderstood. 

And the business-like, impatient in- 
quirer goes away, saying that we do not 
know what we believe. Is the fault in 
him, or in us ? Surely the faithful Chris- 
94 



THE CHANGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

tian knows that he is now living in 
Christ ; that when he dies he is still liv- 
ing in Christ ; that as Christ rose and 
Himself ascended into heaven, a spiritual 
state, so we shall rise, and, clothed in 
spiritual form, we shall dwell with Him. 

"Ah!" — I can hear the sigh from 
some quiet, faithful Christian. " Is re- 
ligion such a moving, changing, restless 
thing ? Am I never to rest in my faith, 
with the assurance that I shall have to 
struggle and search and develop no 
longer? " I know how, in this intellectu- 
ally restless age, that dread hangs like a 
cloud over many lives. "I have broken 
with my child faith. I had to. I have 
a more mature faith now. It is, I know, 
better than the old ; but have I got to 
move again ? Ever this onward, upward 
march ? Ever this testing of new truths 
and larger revelations ? " 

We know how that spirit, weary of 
tossing upon the tides of thought, has 
driven many to Rome and many more 
to agnosticism. 

Are they right ? Is the true religious 
life a tossing on the tides of thought ? 
Are change and movement the necessary 
characteristic of faith ? Yes, and no. 
95 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

" Am I always to be putting forth 
new limbs ?" cries the tree. "Am I to 
be forever swinging in the wind ? Ever 
responding to the rain and suns of sum- 
mer ? Yie]ding foliage and fruit, drop- 
ping them, and yielding again ? " Yes, 
by all means, yes, if you are to live. 
And yet your roots buried deep in the 
earth, clinging to rock and clod, hold 
you fast, nurture you, give you stability 
and life. 

Is the ship to be forever tossed upon 
the sea, buffeting winds and waves ? 
Yes, by all means, yes, if she be a true 
ship ; but within her are the needle, the 
helm, and the pilot that keep her true. 
Perpetually moving, yet never changing 
in loyalty to the hand that guides her. 
Herein is her safety. Let her lie at 
anchor in the harbor forever, and bar- 
nacles, rust, and decay will be her lot. 
Herein is her glory, that she is doing the 
work for which she was launched, mak- 
ing harbor after harbor for which she is 
directed. 

Have you not now caught the thought ? 
If not, you may catch it in the very an- 
swer of Jesus to those same Jews. "I 
told you and ye believed not. But ye 

9 6 



THE CHANGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

believed not because ye are not of my 
sheep. My sheep hear my voice, and I 
know them, and they follow me." The 
basis of the Christian faith, the root of 
the Christian life, the compass and pilot 
is in the personal love of the man for 
Christ : the sheep and the shepherd. 

It was of no use to answer the Jews, 
for they had not love. He would have 
liked to answer them, but while they 
had not that, they could not understand 
Him. He did answer the woman at the 
well, and many a humble man, because 
they did have that. 

Herein is no change, any more than 
the tree changing its limbs. The Chris- 
tian faith is unchangeable, as the child's 
love to his father is unchangeable, rooted 
deep in affection, in devotion, and expe- 
rience. The Christian believes in the 
deeper truths of God, in the essential 
facts and principles of Christ life ; his 
existence is bound up with them. And 
yet the Christian faith is changeable, as 
the child's love for his father is change- 
able. With growth from boyhood to 
manhood, the son interprets his father's 
love more intelligently, grasps the best 
elements of his father's character more 
97 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

strongly, and they both rejoice in the 
maturing expression of his devotion; 

Surely no one would ask that the form 
or expression of the filial love would re- 
main in the young man as it was in the 
child. 

Herein is the unchangeableness and 
the changeableness of creeds. The true 
creed, like that which we have just recited, 
contains the few fundamental expres- 
sions of the Christian faith. If more 
than these are expressed, the rising life 
of Christian thought is bound to shatter 
the expressions, as it is now doing 
among the Presbyterians and in some of 
our Congregational churches. Yet, while 
our simple creeds remain the same, and 
while our personal faith remains deeply 
imbedded in these truths, who can but 
say that our interpretation of these sym- 
bols is continually maturing and enrich- 
ing ? For instance, " I believe in God 
the Father." What wealth of love, sym- 
pathy, and personal communion is now 
read into that expression, when the 
fatherhood in the home is so much more 
loving than in the days when fathers 
were more nearly commanders than fa- 
thers. How much more the sentence, 

9 8 



THE CIIANGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

"Jesus Christ his only Son," means to 
us than it did a few generations ago, 
when a partial theology had robbed Him 
of many of His most human and attrac- 
tive qualities. What added meaning is 
there in the statement, " I believe in the 
Holy Ghost," when we have passed from 
the mechanical idea of the Spirit into 
the realization of Him as the personifica- 
tion and source of all moral and spiritual 
power? How much we now mean as we 
speak of the ever adorable Trinity, which 
our fathers were ignorant of. That doc- 
trine is no longer a mere logical problem, 
but the imperfect expression of a vital 
spiritual truth. 

What, then, is the meaning of those 
people who say that we want definite 
teaching, definite dogma, and a definite 
faith ? If by this is intended such teach- 
ing, dogma, and faith, that the statement 
will be final and comprehensive, so 
that the receptive hearer may take 
it and rest assured that he has never 
got to think out problems or struggle 
with new questions, then, by all means 
" No ! " We want no company of Jews 
who think that Christ will tell them 
99 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

everything plainly and finally. Jesus 
never did ; for no man ever lived who 
could grasp a final and complete state- 
ment of even the least of God's truths. 
Calvinism and Romanism have both 
tried it, and have both miserably failed. 
Calvinism has been shattered, and Ro- 
manism has been driven to the develop- 
ment of dogma, to the invention of new 
and unchristian dogma, in order to keep 
the ship from going to pieces. 

When, then, you become weary of 
thinking out religious questions ; when 
you yearn for some one — some minister, 
some church, some book — to tell you 
just what you ought to believe, so that 
you may not have to think any more ; 
when you long for some haven of rest 
from the turmoil of religious doubts, 
look well to yourself whether it be not 
the haven of spiritual and intellectual 
death. Escape from the stress of life, 
seek the garden in the cool of the even- 
ing ; aye, sleep on now and take your 
rest. Meanwhile the enemy is schem- 
ing and coming forth ; they are close at 
hand that would betray the Saviour. 

But if by definite teaching, dogma and 
faith, a man means that he wants to 

IOO 



THE CHAXGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

bring more clearly before him the deepest 
truths of Jesus Christ and His Church, 
then by all means, seek for that faith. 

First, enter more and more deeply 
into sympathy with the life, the spiritual 
aims and the character of Jesus Christ ; 
throw yourself devotedly into His ser- 
vice. By prayer and close communion, 
enter into the very heart of God, as the 
child lays hold of his father's heart. 
By study of Scripture, of man, of his- 
tory, and of nature, seize hold of the 
very life of God. Questions will rise, 
doubts dim the vision for a while, temp- 
tations trip the feet ; but when one is 
walking beside the dearest friend he has, 
when one is learning of him and drinking 
in the richest truths, is he to grumble at 
the cloud mist and a rough path ? 

Here is the glory of it all, my friends. 
There are those who are, or think they 
are, safe in the Church, in authority, 
in restful, unthinking faith. There are 
others, intellectual or spiritual laggards, 
or cowards — some of them, not all — 
who have retreated into unthinking agnos- 
ticism. They have given up the whole 
work of trying to discover God. And 
there are others, Christians, who have 

IOI 



THE UNCHANGEABLENESS AND 

opened their hearts to Jesus Christ and 
have let God discover them. They have 
undertaken to follow Jesus, not because 
it is easiest, not because it saves them 
thought and intellectual worry, but be- 
cause a life with Him and in Him is a 
glorious life. It is the life of one who 
has found the truth, and definite truth. 
Not the whole truth, — no, a thousand 
times no ; not a complete or final state- 
ment of truth, but truth enough and 
definite enough to live by. Thus he 
has before him the vision of a glorious 
eternity : with Christ as a companion, 
a guide, a comforter in distress, to enter 
into the path of the truth-seeker; in 
the presence of God to enter more and 
more closely into the thought and know- 
ledge of God ; rewarded every day with 
heavy sheaves of truth gathered under 
sunny and cloudy skies, in joys and sor- 
rows, but ever expecting and gaining 
richer rewards. 

And so life goes on with us here. 
You know that each day and year that 
you live in company with Christ brings 
new knowledge of Him. You know 
that doubts and difficulties which looked 
insoluble, and which were insoluble, if 
102 



THE CHANGEABLENESS OF FAITH 

interpreted without the Christian faith, 
have solved themselves in the light of 
His life. 

Oh, the pity of it ! — that men and 
women, thousands of them about us, ca- 
pable of the highest spiritual life, and 
the noblest character, should live and 
go to their graves without realizing the 
beauty, the comfort, and the grandeur 
of the Christian faith. Oh, that we 
could move them to it, and bind to it 
with chains of love ! 

And then the glory of it ! — the glory 
of an endless life in the boundless love 
of Jesus Christ ; of walking in the 
Temple of Truth with the Truth Him- 
self as its interpreter ; the infinite com- 
fort in sorrow and inspiration in joy that 
the same Master and Friend and Bro- 
ther is leading us here that will lead us 
into His eternal truth and life forever ! 
103 



VII 

THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 1 

Some of the noblest truths have been 
concealed within the taunts and scoffs 
of men. It was in derision that the 
courtiers and people of Queen Eliza- 
beth's day gave to a group of men of ex- 
treme purity of life the name " Puritan," 
a title which their descendants have been 
proud to acknowledge. 

Or again, there arose another group, 
who, reacting from the ceremonialism 
and the worldliness of the Established 
Church, developed a phase of religious 
life which emphasized the indwelling 
of the Spirit ; and as they quaked with 
emotion, while the Spirit moved them, 
they were given the derisive name of 
Quakers, a title which with all its ec- 
centricities has been associated with 
tranquillity, courage, and the spirit of 
peace. 

1 St. John's Memorial Chapel, Cambridge, March 
19, 1893. 

104 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

On the road outside Jerusalem hung 
the body of a Galilean peasant upon a 
cross. Art and fiction have given the 
scene a touch of picturesqueness which 
it did not have in reality. The man who 
hung there was, in the eyes of those who 
held the law in their hands, a felon, 
justly crucified. To be sure, some 
months before, He had shown unique 
powers ; He had lifted the sick from 
their couches and called the dead from 
the grave. There was something about 
Him which had appealed to the com- 
mon people and to the degraded. He 
had made for Himself high claims ; but 
to those in power, He was an impostor, 
a blasphemer, and a deceiver. 

His trial was past, and He had been led 
out. The first agony had been endured; 
death was coming fast upon Him. To 
those beneath the cross it was incompre- 
hensible that one who had power over 
the lives of others, and who had saved 
them, should not be able to save Himself. 
No wonder, then, that the chief priests 
threw the taunt into his teeth, that what 
He had done for others, He was unable 
to do for Himself. " Likewise also, the 
chief priests, mocking him with the 
105 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

scribes and elders, said, he saved others, 
himself he cannot save." 1 

As we hear these words, however, we 
repeat them again and again with a 
glad satisfaction, that there hung one 
who, though a fool in the eyes of the 
spectators, was in his very foolishness 
giving to the world the supreme example 
of self-sacrifice. We think of those men 
as utterly depraved, that when such a 
spirit of courage and sacrifice was be- 
fore them, they could not appreciate 
it. We class Jesus and the priests as a 
part of the history of early days, and we 
find it almost impossible to realize that 
those two contrasted spirits, especially 
that of the priests, exist in our lives here 
and to-day. As we look, however, a little 
deeper into the principles of those two 
phases of character, what were the es- 
sential elements ? On the one side was 
one who entered this world simply to de- 
vote himself to the saving of his fellow- 
men ; on the other, we have men who, 
respectable and respected by the com- 
munity, religious in their way, counted 
good standing and one's own life as the 
dearest thing in the world. 

1 Matthew xxvii. 41, 42. 
106 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

We now come to life to-day. I wish I 
could put it in the form that would seem 
real and natural to you ; but let us sug- 
gest these for our illustrations. 

A young man graduates from college, 
of ample fortune, of excellent social stand- 
ing, with high prospects for the increase 
of his fortune in business and the widen- 
ing of his education by travel, or for a life 
of leisure. Instead of taking up with these 
opportunities, he does not enter business, 
nor travel, nor loaf ; but to the surprise 
of his friends, and under the deep real- 
ization that in the present stress of civil- 
ization, men of the finest temperament, 
of the best education, and high social 
standing are needed to save men from sin 
and degradation, and the community from 
injustice, he devotes himself, not in a 
spasm of emotion for a year or two, but 
for a lifetime, to the personal work of 
saving souls. His classmates lose sight 
of him, he is never seen at the club, he 
is in with an entirely different set of peo- 
ple ; he is down in the lowest street in 
the slums, living there. When he is 
fifty years old, and his friends are sleek 
and contented in their routine, he is aged 
and gray and careworn. There is not 
107 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

the slightest touch of romance to be 
found about him ; he has simply been 
doing a hard and thankless piece of 
work. His friends, as they discuss his 
life, wonder what he has done that for. 
Here were opportunities which he has 
thrown away, friendships which he has 
lost, happy years which have been no- 
thing to him, and what has he to show 
for it ? Nothing but an endless run of 
committee meetings and charity associ- 
ations, and a long story of discourage- 
ments, reformed men who have broken 
their pledge, boys whom he has worked 
over who have turned out badly. While, 
to be sure, he has been successful in cer- 
tain ways, exactly what ways or how 
successful they know not and care little. 
"Why," his friends say, "he has spent 
his whole life in trying to save others, 
and he has not taken the trouble to 
save anything for himself, either in the 
way of comfort or pleasure or money." 
Do we not herein catch a note of the 
priests' surprise or derision ? He has 
wasted his life saving others, and he 
has not had the sense to save anything 
for himself. 

Occasionally, some woman of high 
1 08 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

rank breaks from ordinary associations 
of life, and enters with all devotion into 
the work of saving souls. She does not 
mind if in the doing of this she offends 
the conventional ideas of her class. How 
quickly, however, comes the criticism, — 
the suggestion of eccentricity, or of am- 
bition, or emotionalism ; how prone we 
are to suspect of fanaticism any one who 
breaks out from the conventional circle 
and takes up, with a complete devotion to 
Christ, the work for humanity. 

As we see such careers in the vista of 
history, and hear their names as they have 
been canonized by the Church, and catch 
a glimpse of their faces in the stained 
windows, there is a picturesqueness to 
the careers. But if we had lived in the 
days of those saints, we would have 
found the same commonplace features 
that we find in the devoted of to-day. 
We have not got to go back a half cen- 
tury to find those, who, having thrown 
away their fortunes and positions in 
behalf of humanity, have met from a 
large part of the community the taunt 
of the priests ; they have been called ec- 
centrics, or fanatics, or fools, or knaves. 

But, as I have already said, as soon as 
109 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

the picturesque feature of self-sacrifice 
appears, it appeals to us in a way that 
the commonplace self-sacrifice cannot. 

Still, even in the name of picturesque- 
ness, Christian self-sacrifice has a claim 
upon the civilization of these days. 
There is, as we well know, a common 
impression among the finely cultured, 
the over-sensitive, and the artistic, that 
the Christian religion is rather a com- 
monplace affair. We hear a good deal 
about the Philistinism of the religion 
of the middle classes, of the crudities of 
some of their worship, of the vulgarity 
of the Salvation Army, and of the nasal 
voice of the exhort er. We are familiar 
with the taunt that the religion of these 
days is very commonplace and uninter- 
esting. But after all, my friends, is not 
life on the whole, if looked at from the 
picturesque point of view, very common- 
place and uninteresting ? There is no- 
thing that touches us or our finer natures 
in the ledgers and in the stores and in 
the thousands of dressmakers and shop- 
keepers ; the whole thing is common- 
place, if we must look at life from that 
point of view. 

On the other hand, this fact stands, 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

that with all the commonplaceness of re- 
ligious life, it affords, in this generation, 
as it has in all the generations since 
Christ hung upon the cross, the most 
beautiful, the most picturesque, the most 
unique features of courage and of self- 
sacrifice. 

Is it not so ? Do not even those who 
pass a dilettante life in the study of art 
and literature and in the reading of 
novels, who rarely stir themselves to any 
self-denial of their own, but who turn 
with avidity to the picturesque self-sac- 
rifice of others, do not they turn to Chris- 
tian art and to Christian history to get 
their blood stirred with the noblest act 
of self-sacrifice ? Is it irritating to be 
obliged to appeal to Christian self-sacri- 
fice on the ground of picturesqueness ? 
Certainly, it is not a high appeal ; but if 
that is what some people count as the 
most interesting and most enviable thing 
in life in these days, then let us who are 
Christians claim that for Christ. And 
from the romantic stories and martyr- 
doms of the missionaries of the last 
twenty-five years, from the story of Gor- 
don, and Damien, and from the instances 
of devotion in all countries of Christen- 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

dom, let us claim for Christianity a pic- 
turesqueness and an interest and a ro- 
mance which is brilliant and glorious as 
compared with the dull cynicism of an 
over-ripe culture. 

Here, now, we come to the truth ; that 
at some time or other, one has got to 
make his choice between the spirit of the 
priest and the spirit of Christ. We are 
all conscious of the same effort to hold 
the spirit of both, but it is an impossibility. 
We have got to save others, or save our- 
selves. Life must have its compensations. 
There cannot be gains without losses, or 
losses without gains. The soldier who 
cares to have his name cut in the tablets of 
Memorial Hall as a call of patriotism to 
the coming generations cannot have that 
glory and at the same time save his life. 
The scholar who is intent upon the dis- 
covery of some deep truth, and who will 
have that truth, even though he deny 
himself what others call the very essen- 
tials of life, must be content to risk his 
health, comfort, pleasure, and fortune, 
and to lose them, if by so doing he can 
gain the truth. In other words, to come 
back to one of the fundamental facts of 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

life as well as of the philosophy of Christ, 
if a man will lose his life for others, he 
will find it, but if he is bent on finding 
only his own life, he will be sure to lose 
it. In all the intricacies of modern civil- 
ization, the variety of motives, the multi- 
plicity of rewards, it is very difficult in 
practical life to keep this fundamental 
distinction clear ; but there it is, and it is 
the part and the duty of every man to 
use his reason and his character in order 
to try to discover what for him are the 
lines of movement in the carrying out of 
the principle. 

I want now to speak rather plainly as 
to a few of the duties which, as it strikes 
me, the Christian life of to-day lays upon 
us. I am not going to say a word that 
is not familiar to you all, and yet it may 
be that the emphasis of a familiar word 
will come with some added force. 

The fact is that there are certain 
questions and sorrows and sins facing 
us in these days that have got to be 
met. They are not going to be met by 
pessimists or cynics ; they are not going 
to be met by those who are sitting in 
easy chairs, and bemoaning the degraded 
113 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

condition of politics and of society ; they 
are not going to be met, in fact, in any 
way but by an enormous amount of self- 
consecration and self-sacrifice on the 
part of Christian people. 

Ingersoll and his followers may scoff 
at Christians and their selfishness, and 
they may have good reason to do so, but 
neither he nor his followers are found 
working in the city slums. When work 
is to be done, it is to the Christian 
world and to the Church that modern 
society has got to turn, and has a right 
to turn, and to them it does turn. Now 
these facts are staring us in the face : 
that there is in our large cities, and in 
the same proportion in our smaller cities, 
and in equal if not in greater proportion 
in our country towns, a horde of degraded 
and vicious people ; — we may call them 
the offscourings of other nations, or the 
degraded of our own ; you may speak of 
them in the North as hoodlums, or in 
the South as poor whites, the fact stands 
that here they are ; — that there are 
drunkards and fallen women by the tens 
of thousands ; that our poor-houses, our 
insane asylums, and our state prisons are 
crowded as fast as we build them ; that 
114 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

the increase of our cities is herding our 
population in a way that sends a shock 
through our natures ; that the sweating 
system is with us, as it was in the Lon- 
don of Dickens and Charles Reade ; and 
that only a small fraction of our popula- 
tion is found inside of church on Sun- 
day, and that a very large fraction is 
going without any practical or effective 
knowledge of Christ at all. 

" This is true," you say, "but this is 
only one phase of our modern civiliza- 
tion." "It is peculiar to large cities." 
"We are on the whole improving; we 
have our public schools and our churches 
and our charitable organizations, as a con- 
stant force towards the uplifting of the 
community." Again I suggest that while 
the masses may be in the larger cities, 
the same features are everywhere. There 
is not one of the evil features that I have 
mentioned which we associate with East 
London and New York and the North 
End of Boston, and which we say should 
be eradicated in those cities, which does 
not exist in this city of Cambridge, in 
its proportion. "Ah ! but then, the leg- 
islature is at work on some of these 
questions, and the experts are studying 
"5 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

other features of them ; the reformers 
and the doctors are putting their shoul- 
ders to the wheel, and the ministers are 
in the midst of the battle; we hear of 
the increase of charity institutions and 
university houses. Surely the people are 
doing a great deal." Yes, they are do- 
ing a great deal ; but who are the legis- 
lators and charity workers, unless they 
be a few of the great body of the peo- 
ple ? They are no class by themselves, 
set apart for such things. They are 
ordinary men and women just like your- 
selves, who, losing some of the chances 
of fortune, are trying to do something 
for somebody else. 

What, then, I want to say, is that the 
men and women and the children of the 
degraded, of the pagan and of the out- 
cast, have got to be saved ; and in the 
name of civilization and of Christ, some- 
body has got to help. And that help is 
not going to be given by spasms of emo- 
tion, or by reading the newspapers and 
the periodicals, or by an occasional half- 
hour ; but by determined and life-long 
self-sacrifice. 

In the first place, any man or woman 
who has not upon him a deep sense of 
116 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

responsibility for the salvation of some- 
body else, who throws it off as soon as 
he puts his hand into his pocket and 
has given some change to the beggar or 
a few hundred dollars for the employ- 
ment of the unemployed, who has no 
idea of bringing his life into personal 
contact with the life of some one who 
needs it, who is not ready to give up 
some of the pleasanter features of life 
in order that he may lay a hand to this 
immediate work, even though he be con- 
firmed and a communicant a dozen times, 
has not in him the first element of 
Christ's spirit. 

This, of course, is true, that special 
lines of work have got to be taken by 
men and women specially trained and 
devoted to that work. But the question 
that I ask is, Why should not there be, 
in a community like this and in a con- 
gregation like this, one person or an- 
other, here or there, who determines 
with the fullest consecration that they 
will give their life for such special work ? 
In every group of young men, there are 
one, two, or half a dozen who have for- 
tune enough not to call them to enter 
business, who are free enough to be 
117 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

men of leisure, and who may be men 
of leisure if they be not something far 
nobler, — men of devotion. This, it 
seems to me, is one of the highest calls 
of heroism for the next generation. The 
past generation had its call in the war, 
and it is wonderful to think what those 
young men did, what tremendous con- 
centration of power there was, how un- 
known elements of character sprung 
forth at the bidding of the country. As 
Phillips Brooks once told me, the morn- 
ing after he had passed an evening with 
the Loyal Legion and heard the talk of 
the veterans, " Why, the war was fought 
by a lot of boys ! They were all so 
young ! " And as we think of the un- 
developed powers and devotion and self- 
sacrifice that are resting in this com- 
munity now, our imagination can hardly 
reach the possibility of work that might 
be done, if a fraction of them would 
throw themselves into the salvation of 
some of the people of this generation, 
as did those of the last for the saving 
of the nation. 

Why should not, then, a young man 
give himself, not necessarily to the min- 
istry, but to the skilled, intelligent, and 
118 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

devoted work of some phase of social 
uplifting, and in the name of Christ 
throw some of the compensations of life 
away in order that he may gain the 
higher compensation of souls won to 
purity and to Christ ? 

I make the same appeal to the women. 
One is bewildered by the opportunities ; 
and one sometimes feels as if the emer- 
gency were such that a good part of the 
community might well turn their hand 
towards special work calling for special 
skill and devotion. 

" Ah ! " you say, " is there no danger 
of unsettling us ? Most of us have our 
home duties, families to support, chil- 
dren to bring up, aged parents to care 
for, ties which are as sacred to us as 
any of these obligations." True, and 
no call of Christ's can ever be stronger 
than the call to devotion in the homes. 
None of us have sympathy with philan- 
thropists who neglect their home duties 
for society's welfare, and thus undo the 
very work they are trying to do. Do not 
understand me as depreciating the char- 
itable and religious work that is being 
done by the thousands of men and women 
who have their home duties. It is one 
119 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

of the hopeful features of the day, the 
number of people who go from their 
homes to pass a few hours each week in 
work for others. The very fact that 
they come from a home and are not spe- 
cialists gives a charm and an atmosphere 
to their work. This is all good and 
great. 

But I have tried to put in strong words 
the call for special work by those who 
have the freedom to enter it. 

And now let me close by speaking 
also for the call for the home-work by 
those whose duty keeps them at home. 
The whole question resolves itself, it 
seems to me, into this — into the spirit 
in which we undertake our home duties. 
Is it with any narrow sympathy or social 
ambition that we devote ourselves to 
our duties there ? Are we bringing up 
our children simply with a hope that 
they are going to be a little better than 
we are ? Or have we, deep down, as our 
commanding motive the full spirit of 
consecration, that we shall throw our- 
selves into our home-life in order that 
we may do the very best that we can for 
God and for humanity, in order that we 
may bring our children up, not in the 
120 



THE PRIESTS' TAUNT 

narrow horizon of what is called society 
life, but in the wider horizon that so- 
ciety life is not for its own amusement, 
but for the cultivation and the uplifting 
of the whole society ? 

Have we for the highest motive this, 
that our children — or if we are young, 
that by our example, our younger bro- 
thers and sisters — shall be completely 
devoted to leading a life after Christ ; 
that they shall do everything in their 
power to touch this one and that one 
with the spirit of Christ ? In other 
words, have we it on our minds that the 
great work of life is not to keep well fed 
and clothed and pass life smoothly, but 
to help other people to try to make 
other people better, to save other people ? 
Have we it as our supreme privilege to 
bring other people to the life in Christ 
at the cost of our own pride and self- 
satisfaction ? Have we as the highest 
word that can be spoken of us, the scoff 
of the priest, " He saved others, but as 
for himself, he has thrown away what 
we call the pleasures and satisfactions of 
life ; he has not saved himself ? " 

121 



VIII 

THREE CHARACTERS 1 

You recall the story that is told in the 
fifth chapter of the Acts about the re- 
lease of St. Peter and the other apostles 
from the prison into which they had been 
put by command of the high priest, the 
report of the officers that their former 
prisoners were teaching in the Temple, 
the second arrest, and their appearance 
before the council of the Sanhedrim. 

It is of this council, or rather of three 
different characters that appear in it, 
that I want to speak this morning. 
These are the high priest and Sanhe- 
drim, Gamaliel, and the apostles. For, 
in our study, I think we shall find they 
stand for something more than them- 
selves. They represent three types of 
character which are found in every age 
or council of men where a new truth is 
called in question. My hope, therefore, is 

1 St. John's Memorial Chapel, Cambridge, April 
26, 1891. 

122 



THREE CHARACTERS 

not to study and leave these men in Jeru- 
salem, but to bring them into the midst 
of the questions and councils of to-day. 

In the midst of a people who were 
conservative by nature and history, and 
who took a pardonable pride in their re- 
ligion and the deep truths that had been 
revealed to them, there suddenly appeared 
a small group of men proclaiming a new 
truth, a Messiah ; one who was to do 
away with the old regime, and set up a 
new, a larger, and a truer spiritual king- 
dom. And, as if to add insult to injury, 
these teachers of new doctrine had 
thrown upon the representatives of the 
old order the responsibility of the cruci- 
fixion of their Master, who, however, 
had risen again, and now, in the person 
of the apostles and the power of His 
Spirit, was ready to renew the struggle. 

As, then, we enter the council in im- 
agination this morning, the first charac- 
ters that call our attention are the high 
priest and the members of the Sanhe- 
drim ; for in position they are most con- 
spicuous, being the judges, and in stren- 
uousness of voice they drown the words 
of the others. 

123 



THREE CHARACTERS 

In such a deliberative assembly, a 
shrill or strident voice usually betokens 
weakness on the part of the speaker. He 
either lacks confidence in the strength 
of his argument or his method of treat- 
ment, or he wants faith in the supremacy 
of truth. He therefore is driven to 
substitute noise for reason, epithets for 
arguments, and force for persuasion. 

These were just the weak points of 
these so-called judges and interpreters. 
They have been and still are the weak 
points of their successors in character 
to this day. 

We have, for instance, inherited the 
beliefs of our fathers, and we treasure 
them. But new phases of truth appear ; 
the discoveries of science call on us to 
readjust our ideas as to the antiquity of 
the world and of man. The students 
of history appeal to us to change our 
views as to some of the books of the Old 
Testament, and our theory of the inspi- 
ration of the Bible. It may be that the 
movement of our thought calls upon us 
to sound deeper depths than these, and 
to test the fundamentals of our faith. 

At all events, new phases of truth in 
all directions make a demand that each 
124 



THREE CHARACTERS 

of us shall think, judge, and discriminate. 
How shall we meet those who in all 
sincerity bring forth these new phases ? 
The two methods which the followers 
of the Sanhedrim used have been tried 
again and again, and have failed. 

Force in suppression of truth must 
necessarily fail. Every time that you 
attempt to imprison those who have a 
word to say for truth, and every time 
that you try to shut down the latest dis- 
covery, you have over again the history 
of the apostles. In some mysterious 
way the prison doors are opened. No 
earthly keepers, no Roman emperor, no 
soldiers of the Vatican, no condemna- 
tion or burning of heretics, whether 
a Galileo, a Servetus, or a Huss, has 
succeeded in suppressing their voices. 
Sometime, it may not be for generations, 
it is found that God's angel has thrown 
open the prison doors, and that their 
voices are heard in the great temple of 
the world's thought and activities. 

The ashes of the body of Wycliff e, cast 
into the brook, tell in familiar parable 
the story of all such effort : — 

" As thou these ashes, little brook, wilt bear 
Into the Avon, Avon to the tide 

I2 5 



THREE CHARACTERS 

Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas, 
Into main ocean they, this deed accursed 
An emblem yields to friends and enemies 
How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified 
By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dis- 
persed." 

The Church is discovering by experi- 
ence, though occasionally we are warned 
that the discovery is not complete, what 
she might have learned centuries ago 
by heeding Christ's words, that truth 
cannot be suppressed by force : " My 
kingdom is not of this world ; if my 
kingdom were of this world, then would 
my servants fight." 

Failing this, the Church and Christian 
people have not yet freed themselves 
from another dangerous and useless 
weapon of suppression. To-day public 
opinion wields the power that armies of 
trained men used to have. And popular 
prejudice may, if skilfully played upon, 
fulfil the work of the sword and stake. 

It was a weapon which the Jewish 
priests and the Pharisees knew how to 
wield, as they led the people on to de- 
mand the crucifixion ; it is a weapon 
which men and women who love their 
own opinions more dearly than the truth 
wield skilfully to-day. 
126 



THREE CHARACTERS 

A new phase of thought makes itself 
heard in a community. Earnest and 
pure-minded men and women, whose in- 
telligence gives them a right to speak, 
stand sponsor for it. Whether it is true 
or not may be in doubt : but that it has 
a right to a hearing and a deliberative 
judgment would seem to be hardly an 
open question. Yet, almost before its 
statement is made, before men know 
exactly what the new doctrine is, the 
appeal to popular prejudice begins : epi- 
thets are bandied about. Because one 
does not believe about the Scriptures as 
his neighbor does, he is said to be throw- 
ing away the Scriptures ; because one 
is, as far as he understands it, a believer 
in evolution, he is called an atheist ; be- 
cause one does not hold certain views 
about the ministry, or it may be about 
some detail of ritual, he is called "no 
Churchman," and so on in wearisome 
iteration. 

These are not exaggerations. Within 
a few weeks I have had a young man 
come to me in distress, because he had 
been told by a Christian friend that he 
was an unbeliever. And on inquiry I 
found that the reason for such an accu- 
127 



THREE CHARACTERS ' 

sation was that the young man did not 
believe that the world was made in six 
days. 

And the fault is not all on one side. 
If Christian believers and conservative 
supporters of the faith are to blame for 
substituting prejudice for argument, the 
unbeliever meets the same temptation. 
What shall we say of a man like Mr. 
Huxley, who, respected and an authority 
in his own pursuits, systematically blinds 
his eyes to the movements of Christian 
thought, and perversely interpreting the 
Scriptures and Christian truth after a 
method now discarded by the leading 
religious minds, appeals to popular pre- 
judice against Christian truth ? 

Have we not in such a spirit the type 
of the high priest and the Sanhedrim, 
just as clearly as we find it in the petty 
religionist who misinterprets science for 
his own purposes ? 

No, my friends, the whole business of 
suppression of thought by epithet and 
appeal to prejudice shows lamentable 
weakness of faith in the truth that we 
hold. If we are afraid to have our 
creeds and our dearest faiths meet the 
open light of day, if we must hold them 
128 



THREE CHARACTERS 

away from examination and criticism, 
then we may well question if they are 
God's truths ; for how can the truth 
itself be afraid to meet the face of the 
truth-seeker ? Shall we not rather wel- 
come him as a friend on the same quest 
for truth ? 

When, then, my friend, you find your- 
self casting an epithet at one with whom 
you disagree, when you are about to 
suppress his statement with a slur at 
his unbelief or at his orthodoxy, check 
yourself. Ask yourself, is it worthy of 
the truth to treat it so ? is it worthy of 
yourself ? does it betoken a confidence 
in your truth, or a latent weakness of 
faith ? Persuasion, not oppression, is 
the weapon of the faithful. 

How different, then, is the large faith 
and the confidence in the truth of one 
member of the Sanhedrim, the second 
subject of our study, Gamaliel, — Gama- 
liel, the teacher of Paul in his youth, 
the most learned and respected of the 
Rabbies ; the only one of them all who 
had the courage to allow his students 
to read the Greek authors ; a man whose 
studies and experience had given him a 
129 



THREE CHARACTERS 

large vision of truth, and therefore a wide 
charity and tolerance of varied forms and 
interpreters of truth. 

The sharp words of the others, be- 
tokening their weak position, sound in 
the hall, and their querulous accusation 
is repeated, " Did we not straitly com- 
mand you that ye should not teach in 
this name ? and behold ye have filled 
Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend 
to bring this man's blood upon us." 
Then, in response to the challenge of 
Peter, " We ought to obey God rather 
than men," they add violence to accu- 
sation and take counsel to slay him. 

How strong, deep, and reassuring is 
the word of the great teacher ! Gama- 
liel appeals to their experience and to 
their deeper faith. God has His truth in 
charge. Theudas and Judas were once 
new and popular lights, but their error 
carried their own condemnation ; they 
both perished, and their followers were 
dispersed. Why, then, when God had 
thus justified Himself, should the San- 
hedrim now undertake to anticipate God 
in this doubtful matter? "Now I say 
unto you, Refrain from these men and 
let them alone : for if this counsel or 
130 



THREE CHARACTERS 

this work be of men, it will come to 
naught. But if it be of God, ye cannot 
overthrow it : lest haply ye be found 
even to fight against God." 

It is the word of a true philosopher. 
For the wider our experience and the 
larger our vision, the slower will we be 
to dogmatize on the truth or error of any 
given man. Truth sits at the helm of 
life ; why not trust her ? Why should we 
go rushing about here and there, trim- 
ming our sails to every little flaw of wind ? 
Why should we feel it necessary to set 
our judgment on every little movement 
which seems to be for or against our in- 
terpretation of the truth ? Why try to 
head off every little symptom of hetero- 
doxy in the Church, and to suppress 
every man, be he small or great, who 
thinks that he has discovered some- 
thing ? Take things in a philosophic 
spirit ; have such confidence in the final 
victory of God that you will not chafe 
and fret at the loss of a little skirmish. 

There is a great truth in all this. Ga- 
maliel is great. This Gamaliel spirit 
finds its home in universities and centres 
of wide thought and experience. It is 
one of the great conserving influences 
131 



THREE CHARACTERS 

which Cambridge has sent and still 
sends through the country, this faith 
in God, that will allow God, through His 
chosen servants in civic and religious 
and social life, to quietly and gradually 
reform society and lead men to higher 
visions and nobler ideals. It is a calm 
faith which is at once the support and 
the irritant of the ardent reformer. The 
enthusiast accepts the fact of God in 
charge of the truth, but he chafes at the 
slow movement and at the calm spirit of 
those who seem to be content to have 
it slow. " If the thing is not of God, 
away with it," cries the ardent practical 
worker. " If of God, support it." Ac- 
tion, enthusiasm, is his motto. "True ! " 
answers the philosopher, "but time and 
experience must assure us which is of 
God, and which not ; be patient ; trust 
God." 

Noble and assuring as all this is, 
can you not see the weak spot in it ? 
weak just where Gamaliel was weak ; 
and just where men and institutions of 
wider vision are weak to-day. 

Apart from the rush and strivings of 
practical life, they give their calm judg- 
ment, and then shrink from taking part 
132 



THREE CHARACTERS 

in the action. Let the high priest scold 
and the apostles suffer, the truth will 
result in the end. Let the small men of 
activity to-day struggle in their restless 
way with the problems of life. Whether 
this or that form of reformation is the 
best ; whether Christianity or cultivated 
paganism is to rule in society is an open 
question ; whether gambling is harm- 
less or degrading is an interesting prob- 
lem ; whether intemperance in our com- 
munities is to be lessened by this or that 
method is not easily decided ; but how- 
ever these things are settled, God has His 
truth in hand ; things will come out right 
in the end, and the ultimate result will 
be for truth. 

Thus practical indifference takes the 
place of a noble faith, and a cultivated 
ease finds its justification in a great 
truth, and the great philosopher be- 
comes the patronizing critic of his age 
and surroundings. Gamaliel uttered his 
noble thought, and then sat calmly by, 
while innocent men who spoke for what 
they believed to be the truth were cru- 
elly beaten. He spoke for fair play, and 
then would not lift a hand to see that 
fair play was given. 

i33 



THREE CHARACTERS 

And the Gamaliel of to-day sits in his 
study or his chair at the club, and talks of 
large problems of life and elevation of 
politics and saving of the degraded ; he 
is the patron of truth in all forms ; he 
has nothing to say for Christ or against 
Him ; in his superior judicial position, 
he is anxious only to see that all ideas 
have a fair chance ; but what he needs 
to make him a full man is to test some 
of his large thoughts in action, and to be 
ready not only to talk, but to suffer for 
the truth's sake, and even like the apos- 
tles to rejoice that he is counted worthy 
to suffer shame in the name of his 
truth. If the Christian Church had 
been obliged to depend upon the Gama- 
liels, it would not have survived the gen- 
eration. It is a great deed to open up 
and smooth the road for the onward 
march of truth ; but it is a greater deed 
to march on the road as the teacher and 
apostle of truth. 

Now we find the greatest of the three 
types of character in the council, — the 
apostles. Thank God, there have been 
and are such men ; and they are the 
noblest men of all time. Their large 
i34 



THREE CHARACTERS 

and faithful characters throw open the 
windows of life so that the light of truth 
can enter ; they give every seeker for the 
truth his opportunity to speak. But they 
also, like the apostle, have some truth 
to speak and live for. Their action is 
not going to blind their eyes to the truth 
which other men have to give, and their 
wide vision and calm faith are not going 
to weaken the intensity of purpose and 
sense of responsibility to turn all their 
powers to the upholding of truth. 

Oh ! how I wish that you, who in this 
place and scholastic atmosphere have 
opportunity to gain a wide vision, to 
have calm confidence in God's truth, and 
amidst clashing opinions to trust that God 
will in time reveal His truth, and who 
can afford to be tolerant of others' con- 
victions, would also draw into your char- 
acters a burning enthusiasm to work 
with God in the application of His truth ; 
with the Spirit of God go to His children 
and speak to them of Him ; go to those 
who have forgotten Him, and rouse them 
by your word and life to a fresh convic- 
tion of His comforting presence ; go as 
does the missionary to those who know 
not His name, and rejoice to work, live, 
i35 



THREE CHARACTERS 

and suffer for the truth's sake, aye, for 
Christ's sake. For in Him you have the 
consummation of the Gamaliels and the 
apostles, the philosophers and the work- 
ers. 

You cannot say that the two spirits, 
that of the philosopher and the worker, 
are inconsistent and impossible in the 
same man while the life of Jesus stands 
before you. 

Was there ever a man so self-poised 
in his faith in the final victory of truth, 
so patient in waiting for her ? " My 
Father worketh hitherto and I work." 
No violence, suppression, or appeal to 
prejudice was ever His. He was tolerant. 
" Put up again thy sword into his place, 
for all they that take the sword shall 
perish with the sword." " Thy kingdom 
come " was his prayer ; but when, how, 
and where was in God's hands, and He 
was content to wait. So great was His 
confidence in His Father's truth, that 
He who saved others refused to save 
Himself. Greater, far greater, than Ga- 
maliel, in His confidence in the truth ; 
greater, far greater than Peter, in His 
life's activity and sacrifice for the truth ; 
embosomed with the Father, He gave 
13 6 



THREE CHARACTERS 

Himself in every hour of the day, in 
every detail, in meeting the meanest and 
lowest, with the perfect abandonment 
of self, to the uplifting of His brethren. 
This, then, is the sum of the whole 
matter : be patient, trust God and His 
truth ; be full of action, work for God 
and His truth. 

i37 



IX 

THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 1 

There are certain crises in life when 
the prime object is not to gain new 
strength or knowledge, not to enter into 
new experiences, but simply to stand 
still and gather to one's self the experi- 
ences of the past and the anticipations 
of the future, in order that the future 
may be more effectively met. There is, 
you know, the supreme moment of the 
athlete, when just before the race he calls 
to his aid all his experience, strength, 
and training, casts his eye on the goal, 
and stands ready for the word. It is the 
hour in which the soldier, hearing the 
guns at the front, quickly touches every 
part of his equipment to be sure that all 
is in place, recollects himself, his home, 
his orders, his duty, and is then eager 
for the charge. 

Of like character, my friends of the 

1 Baccalaureate Sermon, Appleton Chapel, Har- 
vard University, June 15, 1891. 
138 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

class of Ninety-one, is this moment in 
which we stand. You do not ask me to 
give you new thoughts. At all events, 
I am not able to give them. What we 
want, as I understand, is simply to gather 
ourselves together, to rally to ourselves 
the experience and principles of the 
past with reference to the future ; and 
so to be more vigorous, more intelligent 
and more truly ambitious in our new 
life. 

As I mention this new life, the life 
outside the college walls, in business, 
profession, and social activities, one ques- 
tion rises for answer, — is it so new as 
some of us think ? Is there, in principle 
at least, that sharp break between the 
university life and the business life, for 
instance, that many men emphasize ? Is 
there in the man who happens to be a 
senior to-day and a clerk, or a law-stu- 
dent, or a young politician, next October, 
anything inherently different in princi- 
ple ? If so, something is wrong, either 
in the university or the social fabric. Of 
course, in his practical and to a certain 
degree in his intellectual and moral re- 
lations, a man may change. He may 
become a harder worker, he will be more 
J 39 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

mature in judgment and more conserva- 
tive in life, but — and this is the point 
I want to emphasize this afternoon — 
the principles which inhere in the true 
university life are the same principles 
that inhere in the true social life. 
Rightly considered, the ideal college 
man is the ideal citizen. Being deeply 
convinced of this, I, as I have already 
said, have nothing new to give you. My 
one object is to try, as it were, to gather 
together a few of your university prin- 
ciples, and see what preparation and 
experience they have given you to meet 
the demands of this generation. It is 
with this motive that I have chosen this 
text for our suggestion. 

"And Elijah took twelve stones, ac- 
cording to the number of the tribes of 
Judah. . . . And with the stones he 
built an altar in the name of the Lord." x 

When the people of Israel were about 
to enter into a new era of their history, 
the leader, Elijah, as he rebuilt their 
altar, built it not of new material and 
on a new site; but, with the instinct 
of a true statesman who knows the 
worth of historic continuity and ances- 

1 i Kings xviii. 31-32. 
140 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

tral associations, he gathered together 
the twelve old stones, endeared by many 
memories, rebuilt the old altar along the 
old lines, and thus announced to the 
people that their new life was to be 
the continuance of what was best in the 
old. 

As one looks out upon life to-day, with 
its intense activity and magnificent 
achievements, he cannot but be im- 
pressed with one characteristic arising 
from the very intensity and activity of 
interest, — a tendency on the part of each 
man to confine himself and his sympa- 
thies to the profession, business, or call- 
ing which he has chosen. 

Division of labor has developed with 
wonderful rapidity, and with the de- 
mands of trade and the increase of in- 
ventions it is sure to develop into more 
thorough and exact proportions. As a 
mechanical and financial economy (and 
this has been the first consideration), its 
results have been marvellous. But the 
question for the rising generation is as 
to its effect on the individual character 
and the people as a whole. 

I speak not only of labor divisions in 
141 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

the lower mechanical lines, in factory 
towns where it is most easily seen, but 
in the higher callings. The realm of 
study is so large and the work demanded 
so thorough that a man in order to be 
successful is pressed to turn his life and 
interest in one narrow line : the classi- 
cal scholar may spend his life on a small 
section of philology, the entomologist on 
one insect, the lawyer on one principle 
of law, the theologian on one detail of 
doctrine. 

Hence the statement is made that in 
order to secure success in the next gen- 
eration a man must narrow himself to 
one line of interest, and be content to 
be a narrow man. Granted this, and 
you have submitted to the demoraliza- 
tion of the individual. For you have 
laid upon the men of the highest ambi- 
tion the necessity of being narrow men. 
You have demanded that all scientists 
shall follow the example of their master 
of this century, Darwin — so great and 
at the same time so limited — and lose 
interest in poetry and religion. You 
have compelled the politician to be 
merely a politician, the meanest of men 
when lost to nobler sympathies and the 
142 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

higher welfare of society. You have 
driven the business man to be only a 
money-maker, with no interest in the 
wider benefits of commerce ; and you 
have doomed the lawyer to a narrow life 
of practice, without sympathy with the 
deeper principles of law whose " seat is 
the bosom of God." 

And this is just what for lack of 
nobler ideals many men are being driven 
to, or are drifting to. With this spirit 
existing in individuals, we shall have 
society formed of unsympathetic groups 
and atoms, incapable of common action, 
perpetually misunderstanding each other, 
lost in petty squabbles, science against 
religion, trade against statesmanship, 
politicians against the fundamentals of 
morality as expressed in the golden rule, 
scholars against manufacturers, class 
against class. Granted this apology for 
a narrow life, for a specialist who is only 
a specialist and nothing more, and you 
have lost one of the noblest objects and 
ideals of university life. No such opin- 
ion can obtain in a true university, and 
no such conviction is worthy of a true 
university man. For if a university 
stands for anything, it stands for the 
i43 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

development of the full man of large 
character and wide sympathies, inspired 
with an intense interest in his own 
peculiar line of work. 

This, I suppose, is what brought you 
to Cambridge. You might have gained 
the same fitting for your profession in a 
technical school, a commercial college, 
or under private tutors. You might 
have gained that and more in a college 
which was dominated by the influence of 
one teacher or a small group of strong 
men. But you have come here to gain 
the knowledge and at the same time to 
breathe the atmosphere and absorb the 
culture which the wide interests of a 
university create. Your science will be 
no less that of an expert because studied 
in a classic atmosphere, and your cul- 
ture will thereby be larger; your prin- 
ciples in literature and art will be no 
less true because you have studied them 
in the company of chemists and geolo- 
gists ; and your religious life will be no 
less deep because cultivated in a place 
where other interests group themselves 
and may be drawn into her service. It 
is suggestive that at Harvard the degree 
in theology, medicine, or law comes not 
144 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

from the professional school, but from 
the university, as though the mother 
would give her children no token with- 
out the accompaniment of her full, large, 
and rich character. 

I have dwelt on this, perhaps too much, 
because I wish to press home upon you 
the spirit in which the true university 
man takes up his life work, intensely in- 
terested in his own pursuit and widely 
sympathetic with all that concerns man. 
It sounds very simple, but some of you 
will find its practice very difficult. The 
very ambition and enthusiasm in your 
calling which goes with you from this 
place will tend to draw you into a con- 
centrated and narrow life. Many of the 
older men who stand as your profes- 
sional examples will have gained their 
positions at the loss of a large character 
and sympathies. You will find yourself 
instinctively apologizing for narrowing 
your interests, neglecting your public 
duties, shirking the great questions of 
the day, and forgetting even the higher 
objects of your profession. Such apolo- 
gies may find some justification in the 
so-called self-made man, in the uncul- 
tured servant of present success ; but 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

they have no place in the life of a uni- 
versity man. 

If you are to be a teacher, be more 
than a man who merely teaches school. 
If you are to be a business man, be 
more than a man with a trade ; consider 
your business in its wider relations, — 
to other trades, to economics, to society, 
to character. If you must be a man of 
leisure, be more than a club man and a 
loafer ; you have untold possibilities to 
pass your leisure in absorbing work for 
your city, your nation, your neighbor, 
in art, politics, and charity. To repeat 
the cry of a writer of the seventeenth 
century, " We want public souls, we want 
them ! " — and they should be the first 
fruits of a university. 

Again, a generation ago the final ad- 
dress to the graduates of school and 
college often closed with the exhorta- 
tion that they should " make a name " 
and " be heard from." We are now 
reaping the whirlwind of such senti- 
ments in the popular adulation of " pub- 
licity." This is the hour when we should 
ask ourselves seriously as to our ideals. 
What is our definition of personal suc- 
146 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

cess ? Is it dependent on public recog- 
nition ? There is no question that in 
the popular mind success is closely re- 
lated to public approval or renown. Men 
instinctively look to their fellow men to 
judge their work, and where their own 
interest is concerned, they esteem the 
quantity rather than the quality of ap- 
proval. Certainly the approval of worthy 
men is not to be despised. 

But does not the ideal of success in 
the university spirit run deeper than 
that ? What is all this that we hear of 
the seeking of truth for truth's sake, of 
the entering into the higher life for its 
own sake, in man's glory in living for 
man, if not that we are truth-seekers 
and pilgrims of the higher life because 
these are the true missions of man ? And 
now take this principle into " the mad- 
ding crowd." Boldly expressed, it has 
the sound of a visionary or a prig ; but 
expressed in the quiet influence of an 
active, earnest life, what will result? 
Instead of a man who is restlessly run- 
ning here and there to catch the last 
popular note, who is working at the bar 
or in the town hall with one eye on the 
popular effect, who is, I will not say 
i47 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

poisoning, but simply tincturing his call- 
ing with those subtle elements of sham 
and petty immoralities that catch the 
people's eye and bring in the dollars ; 
instead of one who is ever anxious lest 
the fame of his fortune or his talents do 
not get abroad before the grave closes 
on him, you have one who in calm con- 
fidence or buoyant enthusiasm does his 
duty in life, puts his hand to the busi- 
ness that life lays on him, reaches out 
his hand and grasps duties that without 
his volunteer service life would not have 
laid upon him ; you have the student 
who, in his patient search for some 
secret truth, lets the world hurry by and 
leave him stranded in his dusty alcove, 
for his wisdom will be justified by wis- 
dom in time ; you have the minister who, 
with all esteem for the truth of the past, 
does his quiet work and is unmoved by 
the cries of heresy-hunters about his 
heels ; you have the man of public spirit 
who, regarding at its highest worth the 
voice of the people, regards first the 
voice of truth and his own conscience. 

In other words, my friends, only a 
very small fraction of humanity is ever 
heard from, and of that fraction it were 
148 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

well if a good part had gone down in 
silence. The great mass of men, and 
as a rule, the best of them, simply do 
their work, find their little scrap of truth, 
live their faithful life, give a little cheer 
to their comrades, and then surrender 
the whole into God's hands and to the 
service of those who come after. It 
sounds little, but it is noble, very noble, 
to become a living stone in that living 
temple of humanity ; to help to build up 
man into the glorious ideal which God 
has placed before him. He serves pos- 
terity best who serves his own genera- 
tion best. And the ambition of the 
true university man is patient, faithful, 
present, silent service. 

There is another element in the active 
life of to-day which needs sorely the 
spirit of a true university man. 

This is an age of material success and 
interest in physical things. I need not 
dwell on that, for you know it. It is 
also an age in which democracy has 
risen, public opinion has become domi- 
nant, and the transmission of public 
opinion has been made easy. These 
and other elements have emphasized the 
149 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

power of circumstance, of heredity and 
birth, and of humanity massed, with the 
result that from the depths of the masses 
there has arisen and is still rising a vague 
and popular fatalism, a sense that man 
is not so free as he thought himself, a 
surrender to circumstance, a stolid yield- 
ing to fate, or an angry outburst against 
present conditions, and, worst of all, a 
subtle skepticism as to the worth of 
character and the power of spiritual 
forces. There is that unthinking senti- 
ment that things are made so and they 
have got to go on as they are. Social 
evils have entered our communities, and 
you cannot drive them out ; demoraliza- 
tion has run riot in city politics, and what 
are you going to do about it ? Wealth 
is going to bring luxury, and luxury will 
bring, as it always has brought, immo- 
rality ; the stream will then be down, and 
who can stop it ? How familiar all this 
talk is. And how willingly we are 
tempted to acquiesce in it. But what 
has this to do with the relations of uni- 
versity to active life ? 

The university is a home of spiritual 
forces ; it deals with life and with the 
history of life ; its literature, its lectures, 
150 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

its enthusiasms are in spiritual lines. 
Of all places in the world next to the 
church, the university is the last place to 
weaken faith in the worth of character. 
The history of civilization is the history 
of the victorious march of spiritual forces, 
and the history of Christianity takes 
its spring from Him who was of all men 
spiritual and perfect in character. There- 
fore the man who passes through the 
college gate to the problems of life goes 
with a perfect confidence in this, that 
man has the future in his grasp, that 
there are no social circumstances or 
political situations or moral conditions 
which if rightly met will not yield to 
the spiritual energy of man. He has no 
patience with the whine that because an 
abuse has been, therefore it must be. 

Can there be a better object lesson of 
the power of the spiritual forces of man 
than the past century has produced ? 
We call it the age of materialism, in- 
vention, and physical interest. And yet 
when the class of 1791 assembled to 
hear their baccalaureate sermon, think 
of the social condition of Europe and 
the then known world : the cry of human 
rights heard only in the savage voice of 
1 S 1 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

the Paris mob ; the people of Europe, 
from Russia to " Merry England," prac- 
tically unrecognized ; this country still 
staggering under the burdens of the 
Revolution ; the great continents of the 
East, Japan, China, India, Australia and 
Africa, in heathenism and to a large 
degree barbarism; slavery upheld every- 
where as an institution of Christian 
civilization ; government for the few and 
by the few ; almost nothing of that spirit 
of the common civic and social interests 
of all classes which has risen so rapidly 
in the last twenty-five years. In this 
century the surface of the world even 
has been changed in its physical fea- 
tures, and the character and thoughts of 
the people who inhabit it are ennobled. 
What has wrought this change ? 

Nature, climate, physical conditions, 
circumstances, inheritance ? They have 
had their part. But what has moved 
them and harnessed them to service ? 
There is only one answer — man, with 
his unique spiritual force, his will, his in- 
tellect, his creative and inventive mind ; 
men touched with the fire of divine en- 
thusiasm for humanity ; men working 
selfishly for their own gain, used by God 
152 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

to enrich the world ; men working nobly 
for others' good, the servants of God to 
uplift their brethren. 

There have been leaders ; their names 
are household words. But there have 
been the rank and file of kindred spirits 
who did their work silently and died as 
silently as they lived. There are the 
lives of those whose names are embla- 
zoned in yonder Memorial Hall; and 
there are the lives of those whose bodies 
lie in nameless graves on Arlington 
Heights and under the sod at Gettys- 
burg. 

By faith in God, in righteousness, in 
liberty, in humanity, these men lived. 
These all died in faith. 

While these facts stand and these 
memories last, who of you is going to 
yield to the cowardly word that things 
must be as they are, and that move- 
ments and tendencies are greater than 
men and cannot be guided and created ? 
The list of what has been done by men 
suggests what man has yet to do, and 
to do in this present generation. 

You know what it is ? The tremen- 
dous social questions, the problems of 
politics and economics, of national in- 
*53 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

tegrity and charity, of the family, of the 
rights of property, of the individual, of 
purity in society, of commercial honor. 
They spring to mind faster than we can 
name them. These things are not going 
to drift. They are going to move, and 
some of them very rapidly ; and some 
men are going to be behind the move- 
ment, — the ignorant, the charlatan, the 
selfish and the immoral, if not the intel- 
ligent, the honest, the unselfish and the 
pure. 

The question that I want to ask you 
and that I believe you are asking your- 
selves is, what part are you going to 
take in the work ? Is the university 
spirit, which believes above all things in 
the worth of character, going with you 
into the activities of life ? You will 
find fellow-workers of intelligence and 
strength who never entered a college 
gate. But you have something of your 
own and of your college life and oppor- 
tunities to bring. Carry it with you, 
and believe in all humility that when a 
man is wanted, there your work as a 
man can be done. 

Some of you may think that in all 
this I have hardly touched the level of 
i54 



THE UNIVERSITY MAN IN ACTIVE LIFE 

a sermon, for religion as such has hardly- 
been mentioned. On the contrary, my 
words have failed of their purpose if 
they have not been interpreted as a part 
of religion. I know of no better way of 
serving God than that of taking life in 
its larger, wider relations, doing your 
work faithfully, regardless of popular ap- 
plause, and confident in the worth of 
character. He who so lives must live 
in the spirit of Christ. He must turn 
to Him for his ideal, His support, and His 
inspiration. Christ has been the founda- 
tion of all that has been good in the 
movements of the past century. Christ 
must be at the foundation of every ac- 
tion for good in your generation. 

This, then, is my last word to you, 
men of the class of '91 : in your hopes 
and disappointments, in your successes 
and defeats, turn to Him for the richest 
embodiment of manhood, and in His life 
rest in confidence. 

iS5 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 1 



" And he could there do no mighty 
works, save that he laid his hands upon 
a few sick folk, and healed them. And 
he marvelled because of their unbelief." 2 

For the second time since He had en- 
tered on his public ministry, our Lord 
was in the town where He had passed 
the most of his life. You remember 
that at the first visit the jealousy and 
wrath of his former playmates and neigh- 
bors drove Him from Nazareth, and 
came near casting Him headlong down 
the cliff whereon the city was built. 
Since that day, some months had passed. 
His miracles, teachings, and character 
had made His name a household word ; 
crowds were following Him, and He had 
given every assurance that faith in Him 
strengthens and revivifies the life as well 
as the limbs of men. 

1 St. John's Memorial Chapel, Cambridge, Febru- 
ary 19, 1888. 2 Mark vi. 5, 6. 

156 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

When, therefore, the Saviour, on one 
of his missionary journeys, again passed 
through Nazareth, He had a right to 
expect that His fellow-townsmen, regret- 
ting their former conduct, would give 
Him a sympathetic reception. And a 
first glance through the village street 
seemed to assure Him of it. Out from 
the houses were being brought the sick, 
the lame, and the blind. Up the hill 
from the surrounding country were to be 
seen groups of men and women helping 
the crippled and paralyzed to a nearer 
touch of the great healer. As He taught 
in the synagogue, the crowd pressed in. 
But as He came forth, with hands of 
healing uplifted, and with every inten- 
tion of pouring out his life-giving powers 
upon those with whom He had played in 
childhood, or as a boy had watched while 
they crept through the town, He was 
mysteriously checked ; a quick change 
crossed His face ; sorrow took the place 
of hope. The lines of anguish, which 
were destined to become deeper as the 
months went by, were seen by the peo- 
ple. His hands fell helpless. With the 
exception of three or four sick people 
who were strengthened, there was no 
i57 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

sign of miraculous work. The cord of 
spiritual sympathy between Him and the 
others seemed suddenly to have snapped, 
and He was powerless to cure. " He 
could there do no mighty work, save that 
he laid his hands upon a few sick folk." 

What was it that caused the fatal 
break ? The Saviour certainly appeared 
to be ready and anxious to act. And the 
townspeople, — it could not be that any 
fault of theirs should throw away this 
opportunity. Never had Nazareth or 
any other city such a chance for gaining 
health of body and renewal of spiritual 
life. The only explanation we have is 
that given by St. Mark, " And He mar- 
velled because of their unbelief." The 
trouble, then, was with them and not with 
Him. He who could still the waves in 
the tempest and raise the dead depended 
for the exercise of His power upon the 
faith, the sympathy, the belief of men. 

Whether, with one commentator, you 
say that their unbelief made it physically 
impossible for Him to heal the others ; 
or, with another commentator, you think 
that His miraculous power was still there, 
but that He could not consistently use it 
while the people remained in unbelief, 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

the result is the same. The fact remains 
that He could not and did not do mighty 
works, because of their unbelief. Mat- 
thew says He did not, Mark says He 
could not. The unbelief of a few ordi- 
nary men and women in Nazareth 
checked the mighty works of Christ. 

First, as to that word, unbelief. Of 
course it had not the formal definition 
which often clings to it now. Their dif- 
ficulty was not a disbelief in some formal 
creed about Christ, nor in any definite 
religious dogmas. It was not so much 
an intellectual condition as a moral and 
spiritual want. They had no confidence 
in Him as anything more than a mere 
miracle worker ; they hardly had that. 
They had no sympathy with the aims and 
principles of His life. They cared not 
for His work of bringing love and good- 
ness and justice into Nazareth. Their 
hearts were wholly out of tune with His. 
They were Nazarenes, and He once lived, 
the son of a carpenter, in Nazareth ; and 
that was the only point of contact be- 
tween them. When Jesus would carry 
them to higher truths and a purer life, 
that point of contact was broken. They 
had no faith in Him as the perfect man, 
J 59 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

the Messiah, or the Revelation of their 
God. And the want of that, as we have 
seen, checked the mighty works. 

Here, then, we have an instance of 
that mysterious but undeniable fact that 
God, in giving man his power to act 
freely and to have a will of his own, and 
thus to choose for the right and help on 
the work of God, also gave him the 
power to choose for the wrong and check 
and block and destroy the work of God. 
He gave the highest possible blessing, 
and the deepest possible degradation. 

In this incident, therefore, we have 
our thought for this morning, the power 
in men to check and to help the great 
works of God. 

In thinking and talking over our ef- 
forts to do what is right, and to seek and 
find the truth, we very often take it for 
granted that the struggle is all on our 
side. I think that we sometimes give 
ourselves and others the impression that 
every scrap of truth and light has got to 
be fought for. Some persons talk as if 
God were somehow rather parsimonious 
and niggardly in His bounty, as if, in or- 
der to snatch fire from heaven, one must 
160 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

run great risks, and in order to open 
the gates to eternal light, ever so small a 
crack, one must give a strong and a long 
pull. Of course there is a phase of truth 
here ; man must struggle for the truth ; 
but not because God holds it like a miser. 
The Christian, and not the pagan idea is 
that God is Light, and like the great 
Light, He is shining and pressing into 
every nook and cranny of the world, into 
every house where the windows are 
thrown open to His warmth and radiance, 
into every eye that is not closed against 
His rays. " I am the Light of the 
world." " In him was life, and the life 
was the light of men." The difficulty is 
not with Him, but with men, who do not 
realize the fact of the Light, nor their 
need of it ; who will not throw open the 
windows of their hearts nor make an 
effort to open their closed eyes. " The 
light shineth in darkness, and the dark- 
ness comprehendeth it not." Men do 
not believe in Him, and therefore abide 
in darkness. " He that doeth evil hateth 
the light." 

I know this is all familiar, but I also 
believe that its truth is not enough felt. 

The father of the Prodigal has not 
161 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

shut the door which the returning son 
must burst before he can get in ; but 
the father waits with open arms at the 
open door. And the only thing that 
prevents the Prodigal's return is the 
struggle with his own pride and heart- 
lessness. The one thing, therefore, that 
prevents the whole world to-day from 
being suffused and filled with the light 
and life of Christ, with purity, love, and 
justice, is that the world does not want 
to be filled with light and life. Man 
has that enormous power to refuse light, 
and he uses it. " Ye will not come 
unto me that ye might have life." 

I want, however, to bring the truth 
into closer relations with our own life 
and thought here and to-day. 

We all have our social ideal, our ex- 
pectations of a purified society, a Plato's 
Republic or a Christian millennium ; a 
day when the wolf shall lie down with 
the lamb ; when all men will be just and 
true and merciful. If God is the Al- 
mighty, why cannot He bring it about ? 
We have just seen, — because men, be- 
cause we, much as we dream and idealize 
about it, do not want it brought about. 
162 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

The key is in our own hands. Nazareth 
cannot be uplifted because the Naza- 
renes have no sympathy with Him who 
would uplift. His arms drop powerless. 
That there has been a steady move- 
ment since Christ's day towards a 
stronger sympathy with the principles of 
His life, no honest student, believer or 
unbeliever, can doubt. Men have caught 
scraps and rays of light. The darkness 
is not so deep now as in Herod's day, or 
in the palmy days of Greece and Rome. 
The cry for justice, purity, and truth 
meets with a heartier response from the 
whole people in this century than ever 
before. And yet that there is an almost 
universal skepticism of the possibility of 
perfect justice, purity, and truth, I think 
no one can deny. Here and there, on 
mountain peaks of character, are seers 
and believers. But the mass of men are 
not expectant of mighty spiritual works. 
They do not believe that Christ or Chris- 
tian truth can lift men up to high levels 
of character. Men are not all pessimists, 
far from that ; but even the best of them 
hesitate when they begin to talk of the 
higher and nobler realms of life as being 
possible in society to-day. Jesus is in 
163 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

our Nazareth ; and we agree that He can 
heal a few sick folk. His power can 
leaven society to a certain degree ; it 
can touch the respectable and give com- 
fort to sick and weary souls ; it can de- 
velop the child life and build a few hos- 
pitals and orphans' homes. But that it 
can go down into the lowest dregs of 
society and take the drunkards and the 
harlots and reform and purify them ; that 
it can make business in every way sensi- 
tive to the least suspicion of dishonesty ; 
that it can eliminate scandal from soci- 
ety and filth from the papers, and make 
our men and women and children of 
every class true and pure and Christlike ! 
Never. And content with that, we set- 
tle down to congratulate ourselves that 
at all events a few sick folk have got the 
benefit of His work. 

The Nazareth of modern society will 
not be healed, because, much as we talk 
about reform and all that, modern society 
does not believe it can be healed. 

Let me illustrate the thought by a 
conversation which I heard some two 
months ago. 

A gentleman of great intelligence and 
high standing in the city in which he 
164 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

lives, in conversing about the use and 
abuse of wine, happened incidentally to 
say that the career of so-called reformed 
drunkards and the history of efforts to 
reclaim them showed conclusively that if 
a man once became a drunkard, there 
was no hope for him, and the sooner he 
drank himself to death the better for 
him and his friends. 

In a few moments the conversation 
turned upon prominent men in the New 
York stock-market, and a New York 
gentleman, naming one of the most suc- 
cessful in speculation, said, "When I 
first knew him as a young man he was a 
drunkard in the gutter, and not worth 
a cent." Here, then, on the moment, 
was an instance from life that showed 
that, with a motive strong enough and 
favorable circumstances, the drunkard 
can be and is reformed. And yet you 
can hear the opinion of the first man 
expressed every day in society. The 
truth is that drunkards are reformed, 
only a fraction of them — a few sick 
folk — but it is this skepticism in the 
community which prevents a larger ref- 
ormation. How can you expect a man 
who through drink has weakened his 

165 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

moral fibre and will power, and who has 
lost his self-respect, to fight against such 
a popular prejudice, such a depression of 
the atmosphere of opinion, and at the 
same time fight his passion for drink ? 
But let the poor drunkard who to-morrow 
morning will be released from the county 
jail be met with the popular conviction 
that there is hope for him, let that con- 
viction find its expression in the friendly 
counsel and aid of those of his own social 
class, let him be surrounded by favora- 
ble circumstances, and be inspired with 
the strongest motives of hope, ambition, 
self-respect, aye, of a Christian and 
manly life, and popular belief will cast 
aside the obstacle which popular unbe- 
lief places in his way. The hands of 
Jesus will then do mighty works. 

I only mention this instance because 
it is an illustration that is easily grasped, 
and suggests one of the most difficult of 
works. 

Social life is so intricate, and the sins 
and weakness and low ideas and preju- 
dices of men are so interwoven with each 
other, that one cannot suggest a possible 
reform or purification in one line without 
coming upon many others. 
166 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

Each man may have his hobby of 
where the work of healing should begin 
(and it is well that every man should 
have such a hobby) ; one may press for 
political reform, and another for honesty 
in business, and another for the eradica- 
tion of social vices, and another for the 
elevation of the home ; but the one thing 
that all must have is faith that the 
power of Christ can effect the work. 
Here, my friends, is the crucial point. 
You believe that if men would only turn 
decidedly to the effort of making the 
power of Christ felt, an immense work 
would be done. You recall one man 
here and there in history who has led 
a movement against some accepted but 
well recognized social sin, a Telemachus, 
a Savonarola, a Wilberforce. You can 
name men to-day who are moulding 
popular opinion and leading movements 
in favor of truth or purity in some line 
of society, or some missionary who in 
breaking through the darkness of the 
Dark Continent has given up his life for 
the savages, and you give them your ap- 
plause, your sympathy, and possibly a lit- 
tle of your spare cash. But, my friends, 
they want, and their cause wants, some- 
167 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

thing more than that. Their ideal and 
ours is that there shall be perfect right- 
eousness. That the poor will be helped 
and elevated? Yes, but that the poor 
will be pure and Christlike in character, 
and that the rich will be the same, and 
that all the mass of men between them 
will be sensitive to the slightest taint 
of impurity, or untruthfulness, or injus- 
tice ; that each and all will be full of the 
spirit of sacrifice in little as well as great 
things. The call, then, of to-day is for 
a study at home, a search into our own 
hearts and lives. 

In short, " Are your minds set upon 
righteousness," O ye congregation ? Are 
we living now just as if that ideal life 
for which we long were here ? Is every 
word and deed spoken and done as if in 
the sight of God ? Is every sale made 
and every bargain closed with the sense 
that there is not the suspicion of deceit 
or dishonor in it? Is the selection of 
your reading according to the truest line 
of purity and ennobling thought ? Are 
your associations such as suggest what 
is most manly and refined ? Is there no 
yielding to the popular pressure that you 
cannot expect too much of a man in the 
168 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

way of purity and abstinence from doubt- 
ful or evil habits ? You are honest, but 
are you generous in money, in deeds ? 
but, more than that, in your estimate of 
others' motives and conduct ? You are 
of a kindly disposition, but is there a 
spirit of real self-sacrifice, of doing read- 
ily what you hate to do, but what you 
ought to do for others' comfort ? 

Are your minds set upon righteous- 
ness ? 

It is a tremendous demand, but an en- 
nobling one, that of throwing not only 
our applause and sympathy, but our- 
selves, every wish, taste, and ambition, 
into the clearing the way for the coming 
of the Sun of Righteousness, and of liv- 
ing every day in that light. 

No man can do it alone, not even 
with the support of those about him, 
unless he has the inspiration from the 
thought of those words, " we then as 
workers with Him." The poor, sick 
peasant on the street in Nazareth, who 
believed in spite of the popular unbelief, 
realized that he was not his own healer, 
but that Christ, who was the healer then 
and there, had the power to lift him into 
higher realms of character and faith. 
169 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

The peasant did not work alone, and 
Jesus did not work alone. They were 
fellow workers, and with common sym- 
pathy their work was unlimited in its 
possibilities. Given God and one man 
of faith, and you have a legion of the 
redeemed in sight. 

There is another phase of our thought 
which I have time to do little more than 
suggest. 

" This is all true," I hear you say ; " I 
have not had that faith in the possible 
supremacy of all that is right and true 
which I ought to have had. I will make 
a stronger effort in the future to tone up 
my faith in Christ, to make my life con- 
form more nearly to my ideal of social 
rectitude. But this surely is not all that 
the Christian religion asks ? Nothing 
has been said by you of holiness and 
the saintly life. Fortunately, however, 
for true and righteous as I hope to be, I 
have nothing of the saint in my make-up ; 
real holiness must be left to others ; 
there is no power that can make a spir- 
itually-minded man out of me." 

No power ? no possibility of saintli- 
ness ? It cannot be that Jesus, who calls 
170 



JESUS IN HIS OWN CITY 

all men to Him, and exhorts all to be 
perfect as His Father in Heaven is per- 
fect, gives that invitation with the silent 
reserve that for the majority of men the 
words have no possible application. 

Here again is the same unbelief of 
the Nazarenes. You say that Jesus can 
bring an average man to average moral- 
ity ; He may lift you to a higher degree 
of character than some of your neigh- 
bors, but such a mighty work as that of 
creating a saintly character out of you is 
out of the question. Is the trouble with 
Him ? Or is it not rather in yourself, 
that you do not really want, as your high- 
est wish, that saintly form of character ? 

First, adjust your idea of the saint ; cut 
out from your definition all that is arti- 
ficially pious, all that is weak sentiment 
and lean and hungry in look, and realize 
and insist on the realization that the 
true saint is simply the man developed 
in all his features to the highest perfec- 
tion ; with all his powers, spiritual, moral, 
intellectual, and even physical, brought 
into the fullest play — that he is above 
all else and in everything, a man : and 
that the saintly woman is the one in 
whom are developed in their rarest form 
171 



JESUS, IN HIS OWN CITY 

all the graces and beauties of the womanly 
character. Think of these as in truth 
the ideal saints. And can you picture 
any nobler end for yourself and your 
life's ambition than to be a saint ? 

Having that hope firmly in your grasp, 
now throw open all the windows of your 
soul to the influence of Jesus. By 
prayer, thought and action, let His di- 
vine power move in and through your 
life ; and be sure that a mighty work is 
within His power and your possibility. 
Not that of lifting you into ordinary 
spiritual vitality, but of transforming you 
through and through with His Spirit. 
Believe it of yourself, believe in its pos- 
sibility for others ; let this congregation 
believe it and live as if they believed it ; 
and the spiritual lift and common sym- 
pathy in a noble hope would carry us 
higher and higher in the Christlike life, 
and move the ambitions of the whole 
community. Take no ideal but the 
highest. Be content with no possibility 
less than the noblest sainthood. And 
men will cease to question the power of 
Christianity, and will join us in follow- 
ing Him who is the inspirer and com- 
forter of all saints, the Lord Jesus Christ. 
172 



XI 

HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 1 

" For our conversation " (or, as the 
Revised Version more correctly puts it, 
"for our citizenship ") " is in heaven." 2 

One of the calls of Ascension Day is 
to heavenly-mindedness, and to that call 
we respond this morning. 

As I speak these words, I can feel 
some of you sink back in your seats with 
the listless air, " Now the preacher is go- 
ing to soar away into some sentimental, 
unpractical sphere of thought, apart from 
our daily life and interests." 

And I cannot but confess that there is 
some reason for the listless air. For, as 
we speak of a heavenly-minded man, it 
does suggest something a little over-sen- 
timental and unreal, or at least unsympa- 
thetic with our common interests. 

1 St. John's Memorial Chapel, Cambridge, Ascen- 
sion Day, 1892. 

2 Philippians iii. 20. 

173 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

If the popular theology is that heaven 
and God and the ascended Christ are up 
there, — away up, — and that the world, 
and men, and human interests are down 
here ; then, of course, the man who is 
heavenly-minded has his thoughts and 
interests up there, and not down here. 
He is above the common interests of life, 
and therefore very uninteresting to those 
every-day people who have the common 
interests of life at heart. And he floats 
sublimely through life, eating the food 
and living on the earnings of the com- 
mon people, who partly admire him and 
partly simply endure him. 

No matter what the age or the theo- 
logy, this form of heavenly-mindedness 
will be found, — sometimes stern and 
hard, sometimes placid and benevolent, 
sometimes simply passive ; but always 
lifted above the common herd of men. 
After all, there is something attractive 
to us who are sin-laden and overwhelmed 
with earthly interests, in the thought 
that there are a few choice souls in the 
world who are entirely oblivious to what 
absorbs and enslaves us. 

And yet, is this heavenly-mindedness ? 
Is this what we pray for in the Col- 
174 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

lect to-day, when we ask that as Christ 
"ascended into the heavens, so we may 
also in heart and mind thither ascend ? " 
Is it a supplication for a few choice 
spirits, a spiritual aristocracy ? Or is 
it not rather a universal prayer, that 
we, common men and women, who have 
got to earn our living, take care of our 
homes, look after our business, and take 
our part in all the activities of life, may 
in heart and mind thither ascend ? 

Do not be deceived by the glamour of 
the heavenly uplook of the mystic. He 
may, too, be heavenly-minded, but if 
there is any reality to the prayer, and to 
the ascension truth, it is for all men. If 
I could say no other word or suggest no 
other thought than this, I would urge 
one thing, that to be heavenly-minded 
lies within the possibility of every man, 
and that only by becoming such can one 
be a full man. 

It may be, then, that we shall have to 
first reconstruct our theology a little, or 
at least change the emphasis of the dif- 
ferent terms somewhat. 

God is up there, of course ; but surely 
God is down here as well, "for in Him 
we live, and move, and have our being." 
175 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

Jesus is up there ; but He, too, is cer- 
tainly here with us. " Lo, I am with you 
alway." 

Heaven is up there. May it not be 
also that heaven is down here ? In other 
words, should the emphasis be so strong 
upon the point of locality as upon the 
point of condition ? not where God is, 
but what He is ; not where you are now, 
or hereafter, but what you are. 

And if this is so, may it not be that a 
heavenly-minded man is one who, living 
here in this town, is one who in char- 
acter and life is in sympathy with the 
essential character and life of heaven ? 

The American citizen hails from a cer- 
tain part of the world, from America ; 
but the difference between him and a 
French citizen is not only that of locality 
but that of character ; and wherever the 
American may be, he has the character- 
istics of the American citizen. 

The heavenly citizenship far more 
is a citizenship of a certain character. 
What that character is can only be 
learned by a study of what the essentials 
of heaven are. 

This, then, is what I should like to call 
your thoughts to this morning ; to two 
176 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

or three of the essentials of heaven, and 
therefore of heavenly-mindedness. 

What is the one feature that stands 
out in all our minds and in the yearnings 
of the human heart, as well as in the 
Christian revelation, as the essential ele- 
ment of heaven ? Not streets of gold, 
or harps, or thrones, or even the innumer- 
able company ; but the presence of God 
Himself. Without Him, heaven would 
be no heaven. With Him, heaven is, not 
first a locality, but wherever one is in His 
presence, there is the heavenly life. Not 
heaven in its fulness ; but the first ele- 
ments of the heavenly life. In entering, 
then, into His presence here and now, 
amidst our daily common interests, we 
have entered into a spiritual kingdom, 
where, so far as we live in sympathy 
with it, there is perfect spiritual har- 
mony, where there is no law of compul- 
sion ; but the perfect service is the per- 
fect freedom ; where the will of the one 
great loving Spirit is evidently so rea- 
sonable, so just, and so true, that any 
one who is in sympathy with the heavenly 
life acts in harmony with it as if it were 
his own will. 

177 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

Does this seem mystical ? as if we 
were, in spite of ourselves, falling into 
the partial definition that we have dis- 
carded ? 

Then let us remember the other side. 
God in the Incarnation has made Him- 
self one with man. All created things 
have their relation to Him. " The whole 
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain 
until now." The thought is not, then, 
the Spirit of God opposed to or con- 
trasted with the things of creation ; but 
the Spirit of God as moving within, as 
embodied in the bodies of men, as suf- 
fusing and glorifying the whole of nature 
and of all the things that are associated 
with our daily life. 

If, then, a man has within him the 
Spirit of God, that very fact will send 
him with the utmost intensity into the 
interests of men. He will move among 
them, and live among them, for they are 
his interests. He is in its true sense 
a man of affairs, a man of the world, if 
you will not misconstrue the phrase, and 
yet he is also a man of God, Now, I 
think we are in a position to test the 
heavenly-minded man by a contrast. 

Worldly-mindedness, we are all agreed, 
178 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

is a very imminent danger to the young 
lives of to-day. Ay, I am not sure that 
it is not a greater danger to those of 
middle age. The young are sometimes 
saved by their early ideals, their romantic 
aspirations and their first noble enthusi- 
asms. But for the dull, respectable, sor- 
did, worldly business man who thinks 
business and talks business, and is no- 
thing but business and money - getting 
for seven days in the week, or for the 
worldly woman who thinks and talks of 
clothes and shopping, one wonders if 
there is any salvation. They certainly 
do not seem to care for it even if it hangs 
within their grasp. 

The worldly-minded man or woman is 
the one in whom the things of this 
world, the houses and horses, the dresses 
and food, the business and sports are the 
only things to be considered. Poverty 
presses a man into this spirit as well as 
wealth. The materialism which this age 
has to fear is not in the studies of the 
philosophers so much as it is in the 
avenues and the alleys of our cities, where 
the final test of value is what it cost or 
what it will bring in money or in social 
position. 

179 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

Now, among these great masses of peo- 
ple of the world are of course all shades 
of worldliness, but the essential feature 
is that the supreme interests are in things 
and people, and especially in themselves. 

But on the other hand, one has mis- 
judged modern life if he has found only 
these. In the midst of the world, in- 
tensely interested in the things of the 
world, in business, in people, in social 
life, there are some men and women who 
impress us as if we had moved into an- 
other atmosphere. We feel that behind 
their present interests are deeper inter- 
ests which guide their present action ; 
there is a self-restraint to their world- 
spirit, an evident appeal in certain crises 
to another and a higher standard ; there 
is an humble estimate of self which at- 
tracts us beside the vulgar esteem of the 
worldly man. And in time we learn 
that God, not first as a dogma or as a 
symbol of fashionable religion, but God, 
the Spirit of God, dwells in the heart 
and rules in the life. Reverence, humil- 
ity, awe, devotion, worship, which are as 
essential to true and full manhood as 
even honesty in business or truthfulness 
in word, have their part in such a man's 
180 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

make-up. He is refined in his tone, sen- 
sitive, and yet always open and manly ; 
and we are attracted. But wherein lies 
the contrast between him and the worldly 
or the vulgar ? Is it not simply in this, 
that in the depth of his life, he is a hea- 
venly-minded man ; he has the essential 
feature of heaven, the presence of God 
in his life ? 

Is there anything artificial or unreal 
in this? I appeal to you who instinc- 
tively shrink from heavenly-mindedness 
as if it were unpractical or over-strained. 
As compared with the merely worldly 
man, is he not the nobler, the more at- 
tractive man of the two ? Is he not the 
one to whose judgment you will finally 
appeal ? 

Some of us, however, may not be 
wholly satisfied with this. Let us go a 
step further and touch the second heav- 
enly characteristic. " The presence of 
God in the man's life," — what does that 
mean ? We have met men and women 
who claimed that God was with them, 
and who were as vulgar and worldly as 
any one. We have seen those who have 
been most reverent, most religious, be- 
181 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

come dishonest and impure under the 
stress of temptation which the worldly 
man has withstood. 

Have we, then, an adequate concep- 
tion of God ? Surely He is more than a 
spiritual claim, and more than a spiritual 
feeling. He is a spiritual personality, a 
character, aye, rather the character above 
all others. Righteousness, purity, truth, 
sacrifice, find their perfect embodiment 
in Him. Therefore, the presence of 
God means the presence of all that goes 
to make up the highest in character. 

"Who shall ascend into the hill of 
the Lord ? Even he that hath clean 
hands and a pure heart, who hath not 
lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn 
deceitfully." This is the Ascension Day 
Psalm. 

It is very strange that with the Scrip- 
tures in our houses, and even in our 
hands, any man could have defined the 
presence of God in the heart as possi- 
ble without the presence of the right- 
eousness that is God. 

Wherever, then, you find righteous- 
ness, purity, truth, sacrifice, any of the 
elements which really belong in heaven, 
there you may be sure, even though the 
182 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

man protests that he is not religious, 
you have a touch of the heavenly char- 
acter. 

And wherever you find one who, re- 
joicing in the presence of God, gives to 
the community the illustration of these 
characteristics, you have one who is in- 
deed of heaven ; that is even now his 
citizenship. Heavenly - mindedness is, 
therefore, at the foundations of all that 
is best and purest in the common rou- 
tine of life. It is that which prevents 
worldly interests from becoming merely 
worldly, but makes them the clothing 
and the instruments of the heavenly. 
Let us be explicit here. 

Heavenly-mindedness is not the pecu- 
liar property of those sweet and lovely 
characters that seem too good to live 
long here ; too fragile for the rough and 
tumble of this life. These may be hea- 
venly-minded. 

But there are strong, manly, rough, 
honest, practical souls in the turmoil of 
life, whose hands are hardened with 
toil, whose brows are knit with the 
pressure of work, who amidst all their 
cares and pleasures are bringing into 
life the presence of God ; because with 
183 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

Him in their lives, they are bringing in 
what the world wants above all things, 
righteousness. 

And now, my friends, we turn to our- 
selves. As Christians, our ambition is 
to be in the true sense heavenly-minded. 

Yet there is no temptation more subtle 
and more common than that which sub- 
stitutes feelings for facts, which mistakes 
the presence of vague, pious emotions 
for the presence of God. But let God's 
presence once sweep through the men 
and women of the Church in all its ful- 
ness, the presence of perfect righteous- 
ness, purity, truth, and sacrifice, and what 
a stirring of the dead bones of lingering 
piety would it create. Do not understand 
me as saying that the people have none 
of God's presence. But do understand 
me, that in this generation and in the 
next generation, when pagan culture is 
becoming noble in some of its character- 
istics, when self-sacrifice is recognized 
as the duty of even unbelievers, Chris- 
tian people, if they are to represent 
Christ and His Church, must bring to 
the world lives that are suffused, that 
are fired with God's presence. 
184 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

I do not mean simply enthusiasm, go, 
activity in Church and missionary work, 
but all these backed by the deepest 
elements of the true heavenly charac- 
ter. Men, righteous men, honest, paying 
their debts promptly, being right with 
all men ; pure men, not simply harm- 
lessly innocent, but strongly and posi- 
tively pure in tone, in speech, in thought ; 
true men, who, under no technical 
cover, hold back or add to the truth, 
but who are as transparent as the light ; 
men and women of self - sacrifice. I 
know of no worldliness so subtle as that 
which may undermine the early enthu- 
siasms of a man as he takes on the com- 
mercial and worldly spirit. Each step 
in the decline from the high ideals and 
noble ambitions of his youth, down to 
the comfortable easy life of the middle 
age, may be justified to his own satis- 
faction ; and really, he may not have the 
slightest conception that he is self-de- 
ceived ; yet the decline is there, God's 
presence departing : heaven more distant 
as the next life comes nearer. 

But blessed is he who, throwing him- 
self into all interests that interest men 
and women, and into those peculiar in- 
185 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

terests that belong to his calling, keeps 
his heart and life ever open to the voice 
and the life of God. 

In these days, when thousands on 
thousands are being wrecked in their 
faith through the pressure of pagan 
thought and misconceptions of Chris- 
tianity, when huge masses of humanity 
are going to death every day because 
they are the slaves of their senses, when 
worldliness is rampant, I cannot under- 
stand how Christian men can press for- 
ward into a leading place the questions 
of ways and means, of institutions, and 
the little problems of ritual and theologi- 
cal fine points, instead of bringing the 
whole weight of their character and their 
office upon the pressing of the Spirit of 
God into the world, and with St. Paul 
" reason of righteousness, temperance, 
and judgment to come." Oh ! the poor 
souls that are waiting for you and me to 
come and tell them of Christ, and lift 
them from doubt and misery, and com- 
fort them. Give them not stones, but 
bread. Of course the questions of ways 
and means and of institutions are of im- 
portance, of great importance. Yet, as 
we look back over the vista of Christian 
186 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

centuries, we find that the heavenly com- 
pany, the saints recognized throughout 
Christendom as saints, were of all folds, 
of many opinions and varying shades of 
thought. There were certain features 
that marked them as citizens of heaven. 
They were, as we have tried to express 
it, heavenly-minded men, women, and 
children ; and I know of no higher work 
— aye, of no other work — than that of 
leading men into that company. 

I have only time to suggest two prac- 
tical thoughts which I had hoped to de- 
velop more fully. 

In the first place, it seems to me that 
if one is really filled with the Spirit of 
God, and really has his eye singly on 
what God would prompt him to do, and, 
while in the midst of the world's activi- 
ties, keeps himself in character heavenly- 
minded, he will become less self-con- 
scious, less anxious of results, and he will 
have the courage simply and quietly to 
act and let the results take care of them- 
selves. 

Questions are coming up on all sides 
on which Christian men, laymen, and 
clergymen, will have to speak and act 
187 



HEAVENLY-MINDEDNESS 

wisely, but on which, also, they will have 
to speak and act decidedly and with 
courage. No one knows what effect the 
action of a man of God may have. If 
the man's motives be pure, his character 
of the qualities of heaven, no one can 
measure the effect of his word and ac- 
tion. He has had the courage of his 
convictions. The heavenly-minded man 
is, then, the man of moral courage. 

And, finally, the heavenly-minded man 
is a man of hope. There are many losing 
causes which Christian men will join. 
There are phases of theology and church 
life in which we may become bound up 
in interest. They may fail, and we may 
be tempted to think that the true cause 
is lost. But the true cause is so simple, 
so deep, that of God entering into and 
gaining the life of men, that it cannot 
fail. The Christian is by the very fact 
of his calling a man of hope. His eye 
is forward. For the ascended Christ, 
who has led captivity captive, gives him 
the true line of life, and the Christian 
man — you and I, men of hope — look 
for a new heaven and a new earth, 
wherein dwelleth the one eternal hea- 
venly quality, — righteousness. 



XII 

PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS l 

"Thus saith the Lord of hosts, In 
those days it shall come to pass, that ten 
men shall take hold, out of all languages 
of the nations, even shall take hold of 
the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, 
We will go with you ; for we have heard 
that God is with you." 2 

There is something very vigorous 
about the whole scene from which this 
text is taken. 

To the vision of the prophet, Jerusa- 
lem, once destroyed and desolate, is now 
restored. The streets, which so short 
time ago were empty and grass-grown, 
are full of boys and girls playing ; the 
vines on the terraces without the wall 
give their fruit and the ground her in- 
crease. With the return of strength, 
people, and wealth, comes also the in- 

1 St. John's Memorial Chapel, Cambridge, Octo- 
ber 9, 1892. 

2 Zechariah viii. 23. 

189 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

flow of strong and vigorous character. 
" Speak ye every man truth with his 
neighbor ; execute the judgment of peace 
and truth," are the watchwords of the 
state. 

But — and here is the unique feature 
of the scene — no sooner has the city 
realized herself again, her wealth, her 
character, and her ability, than she real- 
izes also her opportunity. With privilege 
comes the sense of responsibility. The 
nations about her, still poor and deso- 
late, are in her power, and may be con- 
quered. But, better than that, they may 
be saved and enriched. She has, in her 
abundant wealth, a work to do for them ; 
and they are looking to her to do it. 
She begins to realize the glory of help- 
fulness and of leadership through service 
of others. Every citizen has become a 
small focus of light and help to other 
peoples. " In those days it shall come to 
pass, that ten men shall take hold, out 
of all languages of the nations, even 
shall take hold of the skirt of him that is 
a Jew, saying, We will go with you ; for 
we have heard that God is with you." 

This, then, is the thought from which 
I want to speak in a plain and simple 
190 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

way this morning. With the increase 
of wealth and character comes the op- 
portunity of helpfulness and the glory 
of leadership by service. 

And as we have no time to spend in 
talking of other ages and of the pro- 
phets' days, I am going to come directly 
to ourselves and our day. 

For those of us who have been brought 
up in the comforts of life, it is very dif- 
ficult to realize that even in this coun- 
try, and far more so in other lands, the 
great, the very great majority of people 
are living to-day on what they earned 
yesterday or last month. We forget 
that to the great mass of people a capi- 
tal of one or a few thousand dollars is a 
life dream unrealized. They work from 
childhood to old age, and though some 
of them have brought up a family, they 
have never been able to open a bank ac- 
count, or at the best have only gathered 
a few hundred dollars. I am not now 
speaking of the wretched poor, the 
tramps, and the paupers, but of the 
great body of wage -earners that form 
our people, elect our magistrates, and 
build up our wealth. 
191 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

What is true of their financial is true 
also of their intellectual condition. They 
have a rudimentary education, but they 
have nothing to spare. Throughout 
the country districts you will find self- 
respecting, industrious, faithful people 
who, however much they wish to edu- 
cate their children, have not enough 
education themselves to inspire them. 
And the whole type of living is so eco- 
nomical, so close, and of necessity so 
small, that there is no character even to 
spare. They are like the trees on some 
mountain side, by no fault of theirs, 
planted where it is impossible to do 
more than cling to the soil and hold 
their own. There are the common sym- 
pathies and deeds of kindness and mu- 
tual helpfulness which one finds among 
the poor. But they have no abundance 
of life to give out to others. 

On the other hand, there is, through- 
out the country and in the cities, the 
more favored class ; a class including 
not only the rich, but those who have 
been brought up in reasonable comfort, 
who have received more than the aver- 
age education, and who have, by inheri- 
tance and nurture, a larger amount of 
192 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

vital character than is necessary simply 
to hold their own. 

Probably almost every person in this 
congregation is of that class. All of us 
have had opportunities better than the 
average. And as we enter or develop 
into manhood and womanhood, the ques- 
tion rises as to whether we are going to 
live simply to ourselves, or whether, like 
the revived Jerusalem, we shall, in the 
realization of our privilege, realize also 
our opportunity of helpfulness. 

The truth is that the modern com- 
munity is bound together by ties of 
common interest. The idea that any 
one individual has the right to do as he 
pleases, and spend his money as he 
pleases, regardless of the welfare of the 
community, is passed. " No man liveth 
to himself." The bonds of commerce, of 
political and social interest, are so close 
and strong that a movement at any point 
affects the whole fabric. The solidarity 
of society is being recognized more fully 
every year. 

Every one, therefore, who, in health, 

education, wealth, or character, has been 

privileged, has laid upon him by that 

very fact the opportunity and the duty 

i93 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

of pouring out from that for the enrich- 
ment and help of others. 

Of course this is commonplace. And 
yet when one comes to apply the princi- 
ple personally, the questions and difficul- 
ties begin to rise. 

Here is a man, born in comfort, blessed 
with a Christian home, and the best of 
school and collegiate education, who on 
reaching manhood turns thought, money, 
life, and character on to the things that 
go to make up a life of ease, of style, and 
of popular favor. There is nothing bad 
about the man. In principle he agrees 
with all that we have said. But he tells 
us that we have no idea of the pressure 
that there is upon him. The necessities 
of his social life and position really claim 
his whole time. As for his income, large 
as it is, it is hardly sufficient for his own 
expenses ; and as for character, it is 
hard enough to hold his own under the 
social temptations. No ! there is no- 
thing left to give out to others. And 
so, in spite of himself, the man really 
believes that it is out of his power to 
do much of anything beyond the keep- 
ing up of his establishment and social 
engagements. 

194 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

We all know men who, in spite of their 
better selves, find themselves gradually 
drawn into a smaller and smaller circle 
of interests. The large ambitions of 
doing for others, the high ideals which 
haunted their boyhood, gradually fade 
from their thoughts ; and in time, they 
who in privilege, ability, and character 
had the opportunity of influencing a 
whole community, it may be of uplifting 
the political or social life about them, 
have settled down into a comfortable 
chair at the club. 

The man — and with our increasing 
leisure class we are multiplying them — 
who thus lives to himself and a few 
friends, who spends money and time re- 
gardless of the great needs of the com- 
munity, has not in him the first principle 
of modern civilization. For that stands 
upon the basis of the common interest, 
and the welfare of the whole people. If 
the privilege of wealth and leisure is 
abused by those who have them, there 
will soon be no room in the community 
for them. For with the rising power of 
democracy and the increasing realization 
of the solidarity of the community, pub- 
lic opinion, and then public legislation, 
*95 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

will cut down the possibilities of such a 
life. The people are willing to see a man 
who has earned his wealth, or at least 
one who uses his wealth well, enjoy a 
fair proportion of it. But it is a ques- 
tion how long they will endure the ex- 
pensive luxury of those who having 
wealth waste or spend it on themselves. 
While such a life may be more open 
to censure in a man, may we not also ask 
whether the life of mere society is any 
more graceful in a woman ? Why should 
those who have culture, attractiveness, 
sympathies and social power, be content 
to limit them to the small circle of one 
class of society, when they might be 
vital centres of sympathy in the larger 
social life, and realize the grateful sense 
of leading others to better and not more 
frivolous lives? There is something al- 
most grotesque in the way that capable 
and in most respects sensible women 
regret the pressure of society, protest 
that they wish they were out of it, and 
insist that such a waste of time and the 
turning night into day is against all 
conscience and reason, and then move 
into the centre of the whirl as uncon- 
sciously and naturally as possible. 
196 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

Of course there is no sharp line be- 
tween the worldly and the unworldly, the 
selfish and the unselfish, the good and the 
bad ; there are virtues and faults in each. 
Frivolity is not the only sin, nor the 
worst one by any means. But the first 
point that I want to make — and I repeat 
it especially for the young men and wo- 
men who have their future before them 
— is that a life devoted to one's own plea- 
sure, to the round of social life, winter 
and summer, is out of harmony with the 
trend of modern civilization. It is nar- 
rowing, weakening, and unworthy of men 
and women of a privileged class whose 
large opportunity is to give something 
of the abundance of their life to others, 
to the welfare of the larger society, the 
whole community. 

Let us, however, leave the negative 
aspect of the case. I want to tell you of 
the privilege of helpfulness and the glory 
of leadership by service. 

Wherever there has been nobility of 
character, there has been the glad ac- 
knowledgment that with privilege came 
duty and opportunity. The ancient no- 
bility, so far as it was really noble, recog- 
197 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

nized their duty to the serfs, their ser- 
vants and soldiers ; and between the 
baron and his people was the bond of 
mutual service. The chivalrous officer 
has always gloried in leading to danger. 
The true scholar has put his learning at 
the service of the world. Surely, in this 
country, where formal rank is unrecog- 
nized, those who are splendid in wealth, 
rich in culture, and noble in character, 
have a magnificent opportunity. I know 
that we are told that the common people 
are unappreciative of fineness of culture 
and beauty of character ; that influence 
goes to those who bid for it, and that 
small men hold the offices and the power. 
Even if this were so, as it certainly is 
not, still noblesse oblige. Culture and 
character do not look to or care for im- 
mediate results. 

But beyond the sense of duty comes 
the ambition to be a full man. " Unto 
the perfect man " must be the goal of 
every one who claims manly qualities. 
The trouble with most of our lives is 
that they lack proportion : one is sim- 
ply a money-maker, another a pleasure- 
seeker, and another, despising money 
and pleasure, devotes himself to a life of 
198 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

self-sacrifice. Whereas, while each man 
must have his individual characteristics, 
each must also be broad and large and 
fully developed enough to have many in- 
terests and to hold them in proper per- 
spective. In this was the charm of Sir 
Philip Sidney — not that he was braver 
than others, or a better courtier or a 
purer poet than others ; but that he had 
all the qualities which go to make up the 
man, in such true proportion. He was, 
as one biographer calls him, " the essence 
of congruity." 

Now I care not how cultured, refined, 
brave, or honest a man may be, if he have 
not a sympathetic outlook upon the less 
fortunate and the great numbers of the 
community who have not had his privi- 
leges; if he have none of the spirit of 
real sacrifice, of helpfulness, then he 
lacks one of the loveliest and richest 
traits of true manhood. It is this that 
helps him to be master of himself as well 
as of others. The sense that some one 
needs him and looks to him for help, 
appeals to his self-respect, his strength 
of purpose, his patience, and his moral 
courage. 

Thus by uplifting others he himself is 
199 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

uplifted in character; by serving others 
he becomes master of himself. 

The attractive feature of wealth and 
position to the modern man is the sense 
of power that they give — a power to 
command and to mould the lives of 
others. But, my friends, such a satisfac- 
tion bears no comparison with the gratifi- 
cation which comes from the knowledge 
that one life has been helped by you, 
and that that life is within your power, 
not to enslave, but to redeem. This is 
the reward which comes to all helpers of 
men in greater or less degree, — to the 
doctor, the teacher, the charity-worker. 
This is the glory of the ministry. As I 
see young men pleased with their suc- 
cess in law and business, as they have a 
right to be, I cannot but compare that 
pleasure with the deep gratification of 
the minister, who, working in humble 
homes, finds that by his devotion lives 
and hearts are bound to him by the 
deepest gratitude. While his friends 
are wondering why he went into that 
dull calling, he is wondering why hun- 
dreds of men who are passing their lives 
adding figures, trying cases, or sitting in 
the club are willing to forego the grati- 
200 



PRIVILEGE AND HELPFULNESS 

fication of that most interesting calling 
which deepens with every year of life. 

I cannot but think that the heart of 
Jesus must have bounded with intense 
joy at the gratitude of one poor life 
which owed all to Him. There must 
have swept over Him that sweet sense 
of spiritual power. That life was His to 
command. He would use His power to 
redeem that life, to bring it to its best 
self and to God. 

201 



XIII 

A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 1 

" And the Lord said unto Moses, 
Wherefore criest thou unto me ? Speak 
unto the children of Israel, that they go 
forward." 2 

The command is crisp and clear. Its 
note is, it seems to me, in harmony with 
the spirit and purpose of this our first 
service in the college chapel at the open- 
ing of the college year. 

Our meeting here, with its service 
and addresses, is not for the discussion 
of some doctrine, or some particular 
phase of Christian thought and work, 
but in this crisis of collegiate and indi- 
vidual life to look each other in the 
face, to gather confidence in the recog- 
nition of fellow - workers, and in the 
realization of a common Father and 
Master. Thus, those who are taking up 

1 Appleton Chapel, Harvard University, Septem- 
ber 28, 1890. 

2 Exodus xiv. 15. 

202 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

the second, third, or fourth year of the 
work that they laid down in June may 
gather fresh confidence and enthusiasm ; 
and those who have entered these doors 
for the first time may realize that the 
same God and the same faith are here 
that are found in their homes, and that 
in this new phase of life larger inspira- 
tions may come to meet the greater risks 
and the nobler duties. 

The thought of every student to-night 
is forward, and the point that I want to 
emphasize is that it is only in a posi- 
tive movement forward that safety, truth, 
life, and character exist. 

Let me first say that the value of the 
future is to be measured by a realization 
of the value of the present. 

One or two generations ago the stress 
of Christian preaching was laid upon the 
future life, its heavenly promises and its 
dreadful condemnations. This life was 
one of mere probation for the next. 
And thus the present existence with its 
duties and its heavenly satisfactions was 
sometimes robbed of its importance and 
reality. To-day the stress of the living 
preacher is laid upon the eternal now: 
203 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

"He that believeth hath everlasting 
life." Here and now are Heaven and 
Hell, blessedness and condemnation, re- 
ward and punishment. 

There is, I think, something of our 
old way of looking at life in the man- 
ner in which school and college days 
are often treated. They are emphasized 
as terms of preparation and probation 
for mature manhood. The schoolboy 
is thus tempted to belittle his opportuni- 
ties, in expectation of the larger ones in 
college life, and the young man in col- 
lege does not take the risks and sins and 
chances at their full value, in the impres- 
sion that the real ones will come in later 
years. The true perspective of life is 
warped. Of course the truth of proba- 
tion and preparation have their impor- 
tance, but the work of the present is to 
emphasize the worth of the present. 

Whatever value your studies here have 
in the preparation for your profession or 
future work, the real and deeper motive 
is the higher one ; the seeking of truth 
for the truth's sake ; the development 
in character for character's sake ; the 
growth in culture and manhood, because 
cultivated manhood is the richest gift 
204 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

that college or man can give to human- 
ity. 

Life is not measured by the number 
of years ; the fullest life is not always 
that which is old and gray-headed. Life 
is measured by its reality while life is. 
The middle-aged man in looking at his 
present risks and opportunities in busi- 
ness or society finds them no more real 
than those of his college days, although 
college was said to have been a time of 
preparation for the real duties of life. 
No, my friends, the realities of life are 
here. Temptation is seldom keener 
than in college days. Opportunities are 
seldom, perhaps never larger. Here 
character has its real tests, and true life 
its highest satisfaction. 

There may be, there are artificial 
standards in different social groups. So 
there are outside the college gates ; but 
there is, I believe, no standard in mature 
age so even and sure as the respect 
which comes to one in college who, with 
all modesty, is true to his convictions 
and faithful to his opportunities. 

With this year, ay, with this very 
week, come the crises and the tests of 
life. And my first word is, meet them 
205 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

with all the courage and earnestness with 
which you would meet the real crises of 
middle life ; for these are the real crises. 
The college is beyond all other places 
the valley of decision. And the move- 
ment upward or downward begins early. 
Behold, " now " is literally the day of 
each college man's salvation. 

The key-note of our text is "for- 
ward ; " and the test of the true life is 
in its advancement. 

The question that first rises for an- 
swer is, in what does advancement con- 
sist ? 

Some of you, in separating from your 
old schoolmates who are to enter busi- 
ness directly, may have had a pang of 
regret lest they get ahead faster. Four 
years will find them experienced in busi- 
ness methods, and far in advance of the 
young graduate in the art of making 
money and the school of the market. 
To many people in this country a college 
education is synonymous with four years 
wasted in studies that do not profit, and 
in gaining knowledge that has no mar- 
ket value. 

Of course, if success in the market is 
206 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

the test of advancement, then college 
life may be a failure in giving the for- 
ward movement. But if life has other 
riches and rewards, then it may be that 
some of them are gained here. 

The noblest march which humanity 
is making to-day is the quest of the 
truth. Truth may be found in the 
activities of professional and business 
life ; she is found there. But in this 
place the whole motive and purpose of 
life is in the search for truth. The 
challenging cry in the life of the student 
is the echo of the Lord's word, " Speak 
unto the children of Israel that they go 
forward." And as they move, they have 
the realization that the noblest men of 
the past are with them. In the touch 
of student with student, in the sympa- 
thetic talk and thought, the movement 
gains in strength. As the young man 
takes one of the narrowest lines of study, 
and devotes himself to that, but never 
allows himself to be enslaved by it ; as 
he studies that in relation to the larger 
fields of science and the eternal laws of 
nature ; as he recognizes in his micro- 
scopic interest the unity of God's uni- 
verse and the true relations of man, his 
207 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

life is broadened while his mind is deep- 
ened, and he is the larger man for his 
specialist's work. 

As the student talks with fellow-stu- 
dent of the ideals of life, of the hopes 
and possibilities ; as each cheers the 
other on in the effort after nobler 
thought and action, the movement is 
steadily forward. Character is ennobled, 
truth is gained, and the nation is being 
enriched, not with opened mines of silver, 
but with a finer manhood and with 
higher ideals of life. 

I want to suggest, this evening, two 
phases of progress which have their spe- 
cial place in this chapel. 

First, I wish to speak of the move- 
ment towards a deeper and more vital 
faith. 

There is a popular impression that 
college life is necessarily dangerous to a 
man's faith. Many are the parents who 
have sent their sons to this place and to 
other colleges this month, with the heavy 
load of dread lest their boys return with 
an education gained and a faith lost. 
If it is true that with the increase of 
culture must come the decrease of faith, 
208 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

then surely culture has a terrible indict- 
ment to answer to. 

We have no such impression. That 
the faith often does decline in college 
is true ; that young men of prayer and 
religious life go forth, prayerless and 
irreligious, cannot be gainsaid ; but that 
these have any necessary connection with 
college life and thought, it seems hardly 
worth while to deny. 

College has, of course, all the danger 
that intensity of interest brings in any 
phase of life ; as with the business man 
or lawyer, the keen interests in the pres- 
ent activities deaden the senses to their 
higher and spiritual meaning. The stu- 
dent who comes here full of simple piety 
soon finds that the unaccustomed pres- 
sure of the intellectual duties and recrea- 
tions, of the athletic and social activities, 
is felt in every hour of the day. The 
habits of family life are broken up ; the 
conventionalities of the home, the mo- 
ments of prayer, the worship on Sunday, 
are pressed into. Something has to give 
way in order to make room for the new 
interests, and the young man awakens 
some day to find that his religious habits 
have gone, and that his faith is fast dis- 
209 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

appearing. Or the case may be worse 
than this. The temptations of college 
life sweep in on the untried character. 
In some young men the first experience 
in liberty leads to license. The desire 
to be popular weakens the moral fibre. 
High principles give way to foolish ac- 
tions. These undermine the character 
and destroy the ideals of life. The sem- 
blance of religion may be kept up for 
awhile ; but the man is too honest not 
to see the hypocrisy in that, and too 
logical not to feel the inconsistency of 
his present life and a real faith; so that 
faith has to go. And in later years 
the fashionable cynic who was a reli- 
gious boy calls religion a fraud, and col- 
lege life a dangerous experience for any 
man. 

In all the talk of the decline of faith, 
I believe that a large part is due not to 
serious and deliberate questionings, not 
to high intellectual doubts, but to these 
very commonplace causes, the gradual 
loss of religious habits, and a careless or 
immoral life. Let each doubter ques- 
tion himself in these, before he rises to 
more ambitious grounds. Let these be 
corrected, before he hopes to clear the 

210 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

horizon of his doubts by intellectual dis- 
cussions. 

But the point that I want to press is 
that the college life should give, and 
often does give, the noblest results in 
the advance of personal faith and reli- 
gious life. 

There is no doubt that in the intellec- 
tual activities and discoveries the beliefs 
and opinions of boyhood have to readjust 
themselves. Who can think of a living 
faith when such readjustment is avoided ? 
No doubt hard questions and serious ones 
have to be met ; in this is one sign of a 
true movement. In the husbandry of a 
vital faith, the branches and trunk may 
perhaps have to be cut, and the life may 
seem to be taken out of the very roots ; 
but with the heart humble, the life pure, 
and the mind open, the vital element is 
sure to show itself, and out of the ruin 
will grow up a more beautiful, strong, 
and living faith. 

Few men pass through college in these 
days without some such experience. The 
danger is not in the meeting, but in the 
trying to escape the questions, and to 
brace up the old scaffolding of faith with 
makeshifts instead of boldly testing the 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

reality or existence of the faith behind 
the scaffolding. 

Here, then, is the great opportunity for 
renewing and vitalizing the religious life 
and the personal faith, but the look must 
be forward. 

With the development of intellectual 
life, with the changed emphasis of va- 
rious truths, with the new revelations in 
letters, philosophy, and life, come larger 
suggestions of the relation of Christ's 
religion to all these. The personal re- 
ligious faith, which has kept us pure 
and strong in boyhood, now opens up 
into new and wider vistas. Some of 
the ideas and opinions which we have 
identified with the faith gradually sepa- 
rate themselves as the shell parts from 
the bursting acorn : but the living ele- 
ment of trust in God, confidence in Him 
who is the Truth and the Life, gathers 
to itself more and more of the inter- 
ests of life. Now, as we think the mat- 
ter out, there are not two worlds, — 
the world of culture and the world of 
religion, — but they are bound together 
in the same universe, in the same life. 
God is more than the Heavenly Father 
of childhood ; He is also the maker and 
212 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

giver of all good things, from whom 
cometh every good and perfect gift. 
Christ is more than the Saviour who 
died that souls might be saved : He is 
the great elder brother, the type of per- 
fect humanity ; He is the centre about 
whom all elements of truth, all discov- 
eries and revelations cluster. 

From the day that the first student 
entered this college, two hundred and 
fifty years ago, think of the movements 
in the theories of philosophy and sci- 
ence and of the revolutions in theology. 
Men's hearts have failed them for fear 
lest the faith were vanishing with each 
generation. But, amidst it all, how the 
person of Christ has risen to greater 
and greater dignity, until now He stands 
as the centre of all true religion. 

This, then, is the sheet anchor of your 
faith. In all the discussions and ques- 
tions and denials, keep close in sympathy 
with the essence of Christ's character ; 
learn of Him, study Him, set your stan- 
dards by Him, live in Him ; and you 
may be sure that, whatever your opin- 
ions or your theories, you will hold the 
vital element of the faith which you 
brought from your home. 
213 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

Religion is not here on sufferance, 
merely to be held on to until the stress 
of college thought and life is past. This 
chapel has no apologies for standing 
open in the centre of intellectual activ- 
ities every morning of the term. The 
chapel claims that the truth she repre- 
sents is the centre and the vital force 
of the best life of the college. From 
her and from the faith for which she 
stands radiate the light and the life 
which give the glory and the inspiration 
to all the truth and the manhood that 
dwells under the shadow of the univer- 
sity. On the truth as interpreted by 
Christ and the Church, the college was 
founded. On that same truth and in 
that same faith do she and her students 
now live. 

From this we are led to the other 
thought of the positive, I may almost 
say the aggressive, action which belongs 
to the student of the university. 

Where in the world would you look 
for hope, and inspiration, and enthusi- 
asm, unless it be among a thousand 
young men with life before them, and 
truth and experience still their earnest 
214 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

quest ? And where, I may ask, have we 
a better right than here to expect heroic 
action, the scorn of meanness, and the 
highest ambitions ? The overshadowing 
influence of a university is oppressive to 
some persons ; they feel that its influ- 
ence and the associations within its gates 
are all-powerful. "What effect do you 
think the college will have on my son?" 
is the question of the anxious father. 
" What effect is your son going to have 
upon the college ? " is the response of 
the wiser teacher. 

For where man touches man so closely, 
where public opinion is so sensitive, 
where four years make a generation and 
eight years make an ancient tradition, 
where the spirit is democratic and char- 
acter tells for what it is, there are un- 
told possibilities for influence in the col- 
lege life. Few men will ever have such 
opportunity for good or evil as in these 
four years. College history is full of 
the instances of what one or a group of 
strong, manly, and religious young men 
have done in creating and reforming 
public opinion, in elevating the stan- 
dards of life, in upholding purity, honor, 
and truth. 

215 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

The college waits for no leader ; she 
needs none. She looks to each man to 
do his own earnest, enthusiastic part. 
She has thrown heavy responsibilities 
upon the students. Even the vitality 
and the earnestness of the religious life 
depend not upon the college organiza- 
tion, but upon the whole body of schol- 
ars and teachers. If each of us puts 
forth the best that is in him, and faith- 
fully and earnestly does his part in the 
religious and moral, as well as the intel- 
lectual and athletic life of the university, 
who knows what four years or one year 
may bring forth ? 

We who live perpetually within the 
touch of this university are often in 
danger of overlooking the ennobling in- 
fluences about us. The routine and the 
daily duties push before us the details, 
the discouragements, and the smaller 
satisfactions of the work. And so we 
lose the true perspective, and forget the 
nobler phases, the historic aspect, and 
the cloud of witnesses around and be- 
hind us. 

It was only two or three weeks ago 
that a master of one of the great schools 
216 



A KEY-NOTE OF COLLEGE LIFE 

of England stood in yonder Hall and said, 
with mingled admiration and regret, that 
neither Oxford nor Cambridge had any- 
thing to compare with the idea of that 
memorial for inspiration, self-sacrifice, 
and patriotism. And now that a Sol- 
diers' Field is added to the Memorial 
Hall, and that saintly scholars and holy 
ministers and chivalrous youths look 
down upon us, who could ask for a 
nobler company and a higher inspira- 
tion ? 

Oh, then, as we take up the year in the 
name of Christ and his saints, let us be 
of good courage, full of faith, ready to 
act in His service. Let each man's 
heart speak to himself and to others of 
the higher life : " Speak unto the chil- 
dren of Israel that they go forward." 
217 



XIV 

A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 1 

" For David, after he had served his 
own generation by the will of God, fell 
on sleep, and was laid unto his fathers." 2 

Such was the summary of David's life 
work. It was an obituary modest, true, 
and noble. St. Paul spoke the words. 
He was giving to the people of Antioch 
a sketch of Israel's history. As he men- 
tioned the name of the great King 
David, he might naturally have broken 
forth in high eulogy ; he might have 
pointed out his courage, statesmanship, 
and faith ; he might have shown how 
David's life had influenced the genera- 
tions after him. 

But Paul, holding his eloquence within 
the closest bounds, summed up the life 
in the simple but great panegyric : " Da- 
vid, after he had served his own genera- 

1 Baccalaureate Sermon, Appleton Chapel, Har- 
vard University, Cambridge, June 17, 1894. 

2 Acts xiii. 36. 

218 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

tion by the will of God, fell on sleep, and 
was laid unto his fathers." 

Taking David as he was, with his 
greatness and his weaknesses, and his 
generation as it was, with its social and 
national conditions, the greatest word 
that could be said of him was that he 
filled his place and did his duty in his 
own day ; he served his own generation. 

The thoughts, the ideals, and the 
dreads of the people to-day are largely in 
the future. " What are we coming to ? " 
we hear on every hand. " What mean 
this warfare of classes, with its violence 
and bloodshed, this increase of socialism, 
this decay of honor in politics, this rising 
idea of the solidarity of humanity, this 
revolution of religious thought ? Great 
changes are in store for the next cen- 
tury, great movements for the better and 
for the worse." 

And so, dwelling on these thoughts, 
we somehow take it for granted that we 
are approaching the brink of great revo- 
lutions in social, political, and religious 
life. The forward look moves our inter- 
est and sympathies. 

Now, while this may all be true, and 
219 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

while in its proportion the forward look 
has its place, the thought that I want to 
emphasize, my friends, is that we are 
now living in the present, and that our 
duty is in the present conditions ; that 
he serves the future best who best serves 
the present. 

I have no new thoughts to give you 
to-day. I do not believe that you care 
for them now. What you want is a sim- 
ple, straightforward statement of a few 
of the duties of an educated young man 
in these times, so that you may think 
over them and act upon them. 

These I wish to suggest in the three 
phases of social, political, and religious 
life. 

First, in the social life. 

In our discussions as to the present 
and future social conditions, twd points 
are usually emphasized : one, which I 
have already suggested, that changes are 
coming. The times seem out of joint; 
social injustice is said to exist ; but where 
to put the blame, or make the cure, is 
not so easy to state. The other point 
emphasized is that men are needed who 
will throw themselves into the work of 
220 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

studying and changing these social con- 
ditions ; men who will devote themselves 
to the uplifting of humanity, experts in 
charities and model tenements, philan- 
thropists who will give time, money, and 
life for the poor. 

This is all well and noble. Not a word 
that I may say, will, I trust, weaken an 
ambition to ennoble the social conditions 
of the future, or will check a man from 
devoting his life to charities. 

And yet these do not strike me as the 
first or most immediate calls to the men 
of the present. For what do we find 
as the conditions of to-day ? This is, 
for instance, an era of commerce and 
business ; farming, manufacturing, and 
trading employ the lives of the mass 
of men, who are called by God and 
by the conditions of the times to put 
their lives into these duties. This is an 
age which has been forced to recognize 
the limitations of man's power in what 
are called the laws of nature, of compe- 
tion, and of demand and supply. 

Looked at from one point of view, it 
sometimes seems as if, under these laws 
and the great movements of famines 
and harvests, men were helpless. On 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

the other hand, this is an age which has 
called forth and discovered the power 
of man over nature. Through the am- 
bition, the dauntless courage and the 
dominant will of man, the world's surface 
has been changed, and nature has yielded 
her hoarded riches. Behind the laws of 
nature and competition, then, we have 
the spirit of man, who can transform the 
conditions, guide the powers, and turn 
what might be scourges into blessings. 

The point, then, that I am after is 
that the great majority of you and of all 
young men have got to take up life in its 
present conditions. You have got to 
choose your calling, be a doctor, or a 
lawyer, or a broker, or a manufacturer, 
earn your living, and take your humble 
part in the great social organism. The 
great work in life will be, not first to 
change the conditions of society, but 
taking the conditions as they are, to 
broaden and ennoble the life within 
them. What I urge, then, is a larger 
conception of your business, a broader 
view of your profession. 

Perhaps I can put it best in this way. 

There is, you know, the popular dis- 
tinction between business and charity. 

222 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

A man may be in a position wherein, by 
perfectly legitimate and business-like 
methods, he may impoverish his neigh- 
bor ; that is business : and then he may 
sit down and sign a large check by 
which he may relieve that neighbor from 
utter want ; that is charity. Or a doctor 
may treat a patient and get the largest 
fee possible ; that is business : and then 
he may give his services to some poor pa- 
tient ; that is charity. Now, while there 
is an element of truth in these distinc- 
tions, I claim that you cannot slice up a 
man in that way, and ticket his different 
acts with the labels of business and char- 
ity. He is a man ; and the spirit with 
which he conducts business or charity in- 
fuses all his acts. A hard, narrow, busi- 
ness man may give his checks to the poor 
every day, and yet be lacking in the 
deeper elements of a charitable spirit ; 
and a doctor may be firm in his charges 
to the poor, and yet in the depth of 
his sympathy, the devotion of his best 
skill upon all classes, be full of the spirit 
of charity. 

Within a week a man has refused to 
gain thousands of dollars in increased 
rent by letting a fraction of his building 
223 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

for a bar-room. It was not business, 
and it was not charity ; but it was a high 
conception of what he owed to his own 
self-respect and to the community. As 
one of the trust lawyers of Boston, who 
was also one of the ornaments of a 
governing Board of this University, put 
it some years ago : " No gentleman rents 
his buildings for a saloon." 

The intricacy of social and business 
life is such that it is very difficult to 
place responsibility. Some of you may, 
in a few years, be directors of a mill or 
of a mine. As directors, you must con- 
duct the business on business principles ; 
buy labor in the cheapest market and 
make profits for your stockholders of 
whom you are one. Meanwhile, through 
these very business methods, the work- 
ing people are being ground to poverty. 
The community where they live is ridden 
with rum and low political and social life. 
It is not the business of the directors 
and stockholders to keep those people 
clean and pure ; it is not business to 
build hospitals or provide them with de- 
cent tenements. And yet, as the profits 
come in part from the labor of that 
community, as there is at least a slight 
224 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

connection of employer and employed, it 
is the duty of some one, — and who more 
than the directors and stockholders, not 
as such, but as men ? — to take their part 
in the social uplifting. Do not under- 
stand me that the work of business and 
social uplift can be divided among the 
mills and corporations and mines. I 
have no such dream as that. But what I 
do plead for is that you, as business men, 
manufacturers, miners, and stockholders, 
will infuse into your business more of 
the spirit of humanity, of high honor 
which is more than honesty, and of mu- 
tual forbearance and helpfulness which 
is more than what is called charity. It 
is well to remember that to a self-respect- 
ing workingman there is nothing more 
irritating than that he should have favors 
on the ground of charity ; and also to 
remember that that same man expects 
and demands justice, and while demo- 
cracy reigns he is going to have it. 

It is one of the great dangers of life 
that duty usually calls us to see only one 
or a few phases of life ; so that the capi- 
talist sees his own interest and the laborer 
his. It is natural and it is dangerous. 
A wider vision, a larger sympathy, a 
225 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

nobler conception of his calling, are the 
privileges of a man of liberal education. 
So that in the service of his generation 
he gives to his calling, be it medicine, 
law, business, or what you will, a larger 
meaning, a broader usefulness and a 
greater power. 

I turn now to the duty of the educated 
man in the political life ; or, I should 
rather say, his duty as a patriot. 

You have had, during these four years, 
a nobler object-lesson than is given to 
any other university. To pass through 
Memorial Hall day after day, to read the 
names upon the tablets, to look upon 
the portraits of the heroes, is a perpetual 
call to patriotism. You have missed the 
inspiration which came to us thirty years 
ago in the drum-beat, the sound of war, 
the crippled soldiers upon the streets, 
the frequent cheer, the suspense as the 
news of battle was passed from mouth 
to mouth, the sorrow, the soldiers' fune- 
rals, the welcome home, the victories. 
The blood moves quicker now as one re- 
calls the news of Gettysburg, Antietam, 
Mobile, and Richmond. The Harvard 
Memorial Biographies, containing the 
226 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

lives of those whose names are on yonder 
tablets, always stand on the shelf at my 
right hand, next to my Bible, that in any 
hour of discouragement I may dip into 
them and catch some of their noble 
spirit. 

Pardon the personal word ; but I want 
to make you realize how Harvard has 
shed her blood for the country. 

"They served their own generation 
by the will of God, and fell on sleep 
and were laid unto their fathers." And 
now for ourselves, and this generation, 
what are the calls to service ? 

I might tell you that the educated and 
privileged man is needed in the political 
life. I might urge you to the study of 
political movements and action in them. 
I might press you to drop your chosen 
profession or business and devote your- 
self to the lifting of the political life 
from the slough in which it is flounder- 
ing to-day — and I would do well. But, 
as I suggested before, my thought to- 
day is not for the specialists and the 
devotees, but with the great body of 
men who are going to earn their living 
and do their duty in the various call- 
ings of life. What duties have they as 
227 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

patriots ? What can they do for their 
country ? 

In the first place, they are a part of 
the great body of the people who create 
the public sentiment, who develop the 
politicians, and who support the leaders. 
Therefore the first and supreme duty is 
that a man have a noble and high con- 
ception of what a nation is, and what his 
country should be. We have reached a 
time in the Christian era when we are 
outgrowing the savage idea that the truest 
patriot is he who fights longest, oftenest, 
and latest for his country, be she right 
or wrong. Humanity is larger than the 
nation, and though self-protection and 
even increase of national power may be 
right, yet the nations are the servants 
of humanity, and their great work is the 
development of a humanity that is just, 
true, and merciful. 

The true conception of the nation is 
not that of physical force, armies or 
wealth, but that of a great people bound 
together by the strongest ties of justice, 
truth, and mercy, and pledged to act 
with high honor toward other nations. 
A nation, therefore, owes it to itself to 
be just and true to the weakest people in 
228 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

the world, even though it be at the cost 
of pride and self-restraint. For injus- 
tice will react upon the character of the 
people and demoralize the nation itself. 

Your first duty, then, is to see, as far 
as in you lies, that no love of conquest, 
no pride in a great navy, no jingoism, no 
desire to act the bully, leads this nation 
to be unjust, untrue, and unmerciful. 
National righteousness first, the country 
afterwards. 

Again, the foundation of our demo- 
cracy is trust in man, mutual confidence 
that men will be true to their trust. On 
this rests the sacredness of the ballot. 
If the people once really lose confidence 
in their fellow-men, — that the voter may 
be bought, that the alderman may be 
bought, that the senator may be bought, 
— then will come the time and opportu- 
nity for Caesarism and for government 
by force. 

Occasionally we are startled by rumors 
of corruption in high places, — by strong 
evidence, too, — and then we blame the 
leaders and the politicians. I call you 
back to the thought that the people 
make the leaders. When, then, any 
such flagrant breach of trust is known, 
229 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

first look to yourself and to the body of 
the people. May it not be that the public 
evil is only a symptom of a popular sin 

— ay, of your own attitude ? 

The director of a corporation, who is 
pressing some interest through the legis- 
lature, and who turns his back and shuts 
his eyes while some one else carries it 
through for him (though he suspects or 
he well knows, by doubtful methods or 
by bribery), is the embodiment of the 
worst spirit in our national life. The 
citizens who by evil compromise or in- 
fluence push their own private interests 
through our legislatures in spite of the 
public good represent the same spirit. 
Our complicated forms of business make 
it difficult to place responsibility. One 
wicked partner can handle the doubtful 
work. Therefore upon the shareholders 

— in other words, upon the great body of 
citizens — rests the responsibility that, so 
far from conniving at doubtful methods 
or being indifferent to them, they shall 
be aggressive in their endeavors and de- 
mands that everything touching public 
life shall be above the suspicion of fraud 
or bribery. 

The men of one section may be try- 
230 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

ing to get something for nothing by 
paying their debts in silver. The men 
of another section may have been getting 
something for nothing by speculating in 
Western lands, railroads, and mines, and 
by controlling the legislatures. That 
they have lost as well as gained does not 
touch the ethics of the question. The 
weak spot has been in the selfishness 
with which self-interest and sectional in- 
terest are pushed regardless of the rights 
of the whole people. 

The life of a private citizen as well as 
that of a public man is a trust. It is 
due to the community as well as to him- 
self that in his personal relations, his 
business, his expenditures and his luxu- 
ries, the citizen does not offend the con- 
science of the people, nor rudely disturb 
the conventionalities of society, but 
rather, if he be a man of education, that 
he sustain by his own example the con- 
science of the people, making them sen- 
sitive to every suspicion of dishonesty, 
and leading them to self-restraint, sim- 
plicity, and nobility of life. 

I now come to the suggestion of a 
few of the duties of the educated young 
231 



A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

man in the religious life of this genera- 
tion. 

One condition stands out clear in the 
fundamental principles of our nation, — 
the freedom of the state from the church, 
religious liberty. And the first duty of 
every citizen is to withstand every sug- 
gestion and every act of legislation 
which looks towards the patronage of 
any form of religion by the state. 

Religious liberty means for the peo- 
ple responsibility. Looking to the state 
for no aid nor recognition, the members 
of the church must look to themselves 
if they are to sustain and upbuild the 
religious character of the people. We 
have, my friends, in this university and 
in New England a noble religious inher- 
itance. In the stock and character of 
the people is stored a rich capital of 
spiritual experience inherited from our 
fathers. 

Three simple points I want to make. 

In the first place : without the sym- 
pathy of men of education, without the 
sweet reasonableness, the breadth of 
vision, the patient love of truth, and 
the deep-seated enthusiasm which go 
with culture, the religion of the people 
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A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

will become emotional, vulgar, and nar- 
row. 

On the other hand, without the simple 
faith, the earnestness, the hope and the 
devotion which go with the religion of 
the common people, culture will lose its 
virility, become over-ripe, cynical, and 
nerveless. Therefore the man of the 
truest culture will be the man of the 
deepest religious sympathies. Instead 
of cutting down his faith to its barest 
elements and studying how little he be- 
lieves, he will count faith a noble thing 
and see how much he can believe. He 
will look at religion not as a series of 
statements, a list of dogmas, or a bunch 
of emotions, but as communion with the 
great Spirit who embodies all truth, jus- 
tice, and love ; every good and every 
perfect gift from science, from culture, 
from history, and from experience is 
from Him. Thus will go hand in hand 
the development of character, of culture, 
and of faith. 

In the next place : I warn you against 
the stolid commercial spirit which is 
liable to come with middle age. Youth 
is saved by its ideals. 

Twenty years hence, some of your 
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A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

ideals will have been lost, some of your 
hopes broken, and your interests bound 
up in making a living, carrying on your 
business, and satisfying your clients. 
Then the changes of the market, the 
newspaper seven days in the week, the 
interest in politics, and the small talk of 
the day, may gradually enwrap you, and 
you may become one of those stolid, 
uninteresting, commercial machines that 
we meet in the offices and clubs. I trust 
not. To escape this, the great truths 
which are bound up in religion must be 
your companions. The romance which 
even in these commercial days goes with 
the life of God's saints must move you. 
The self-sacrifice, the sweet charity, and 
the great hopes that still fill the lives of 
Christ's children must touch and inspire 
you. No man or community can live 
on the spiritual inheritance of the past 
without becoming spiritually bankrupt. 
The hope of the present cannot be in 
the religion of the past, but in the faith 
and in the life of the present. 

In the third place (and I speak very 

practically) : if you think thus, if you 

believe that faith and Christ have their 

place in the present, you have an imme- 

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A SERVANT OF HIS OWN GENERATION 

diate and a life-long duty, — that of 
expressing the faith in your words and 
character, that of giving to the world 
in your life the truth, the purity, the 
public spirit, and the self-sacrifice of 
Christ Himself. 

You may have felt, my friends, that 
this sermon is hardly up to the dignity 
of a Baccalaureate ; it has not treated of 
great thoughts in a great way as becomes 
the close of a university career. Cer- 
tainly I have felt it. And yet, even if I 
could have spoken with the conventional 
dignity of such occasions, I would not. 

No son of Harvard who comes here 
to speak to you from the problems, the 
sins, the needs, the heroisms, and the 
hopes of the great body of the people 
can say other than the simple, earnest 
word that moves him. 

Men of the class of '94, the country 
needs men — pure, true, strong, and 
faithful. God help you to be such. You 
have a few years in which to labor, fight, 
and conquer here; and then, when life 
is over, may your Alma Mater be able 
to bear witness, " He served his own 
generation by the will of God." 
235 



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